Your Awful Wedded Life
by Verity359
Summary: Donna meets Lee McAvoy again (the man from the library) and he's taken her promise to find him to heart. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Rose deal with lizard people who have hijacked a 51st century luxury liner. Sequel to "Once While Calibrating a Trans-Temporal Psychic Beacon Spatio-Locator," but can be read as a stand-alone fic.
1. Prologue

_**Credit to Lindsay the narwhal, who said, "I think it would be cool if Donna somehow found that guy from the library episode again. I'm a total wedding crasher lol." My immediate response was, "I can't do that. We've already seen her marry Shaun Temple." Later, it occurred to me…. Who gives a frack about Shaun Temple?**_

_**Also, a lot of credit and huge thanks (again) to LostInWho, who beta-read this entire thing and fixed a hundred thousand problems that I had completely overlooked. Thank you, LostInWho!**_

_**Finally, fair warning: This fic works fine as a stand-alone, but it is technically a sequel. All you have to know is that in Chapter 1, we begin with the Doctor, Rose, Donna, and Shaun Temple (Donna's bridegroom from The End of Time) all traveling together, angst-free and memories intact. If you want to know how Donna got her memories back and what Rose is doing here, the fic that precedes this is available on my page. If you don't care how we got to this point (and it's really not necessary to understand this story), then by all means, read on!**_

...

**Prologue**

...

Setting: Christmas Day, Chiswick, 2009

Shaun Temple woke up on Christmas day blissfully unaware that aliens existed. Maintaining this ignorance throughout his morning routine wasn't difficult at all – he had coffee, put on a blue polo shirt, and changed the oil in his car, all without seeing any signs of alien life.

Sometime after 1:00, he drove his fiancée to see her family and exchange presents. He happily missed the dimensionally transcendent blue box materializing in the street outside, and didn't notice when his soon-to-be grandfather-in-law disappeared for the rest of the afternoon.

The weird feeling of turning into a Master clone at about 3:30 caused him no small amount of alarm, but pretty soon he'd been changed back, and what with his brain cells rewiring themselves again to their original state, he remembered none of it. All seemed to be well.

At about 4:00, his comfortable obliviousness was put to the real test when a massive worldwide earthquake coincided with a giant burnt orange planet appearing in the sky. For a moment, his happy certainty about humanity's solitude in the universe seemed to be in grave jeopardy. What could possibly explain this? Could he really be seeing what looked like evidence of… of…?

Heroically, he clamped down on such thoughts and waited out the crisis until the planet was gone and he had a chance to think things through. There had to be a reasonable explanation for this. Massive orange planets were certainly out of the ordinary, but earthquakes weren't unheard of. Maybe a gas leak caused by the earthquake had led to some sort of mass hallucination. Yes, that was it. It was obvious, really, when you thought about it.

His worldview thankfully secure again, he waited for his fiancée to reappear from wherever she'd gone off to. Another Christmas full of the strange but perfectly understandable had passed, and he was nearly home safe.

That is, naturally, when Donna came back and ruined everything.

**[Roll credits, play opening theme song.]**


	2. Chapter 1

Setting: 51st century, interstellar cruise ship_ Hindenburg_

Donna, the Doctor, Rose, and Shaun stepped off the TARDIS and onto the _Hindenburg_, storage section C. It looked like a large, dark pantry, sparsely stocked with boxes of cans labeled "pickled olives" and "dehydrated Orion argathi flakes." Three of the four travelers were dressed up to the nines, Donna in a black sleeveless dress with a plunging neckline, an ostentatious gemstone necklace, and her hair pinned up; Rose in a flirty wine-colored one-shouldered piece she got from the wardrobe room; and Shaun (who was looking distinctly uncomfortable) in a pirate-like embroidered waistcoat with poofy white sleeves that the Doctor insisted was in style this century. The Doctor, of course, was wearing his usual pinstripes.

"It's about time!" Donna exclaimed with a wide smile, sweeping out the door and giving her ample cleavage a quick, subtle adjustment. "Finally, somewhere really posh! I haven't had a chance to dress up since the 1920s."

Rose followed close behind with a mischievous grin. "Oh, I dunno. Venice in 1580? That was pretty swank. All those gowns and little umbrellas."

"Yeah, well, it doesn't count if you spend the whole trip being chased by vampires. Besides, I was just in jeans and trainers."

"I told you, they weren't vampires," the Doctor argued from the storage room door, where he was peering out to make sure the coast was clear. "They were Saturnynians. Vampires aren't real."

"Werewolves are real," pointed out Rose. "Why can't vampires be real?"

"_That_ was a lupine wavelength haemovarifo—you know what? Fine. Yes. Werewolves are real."

Shaun, dragging behind the rest of the group, heard the tail-end of that sentence and winced slightly. He caught up to his wife and muttered anxiously under his breath. "There are gonna be werewolves now? Is every trip like this?"

Donna flashed him a brilliant smile. "Oh, don't worry, dear. This is just a cruise ship. I've been on plenty of trips where nothing attacked us. That spa on Midnight, for example."

"Speak for yourself," the Doctor muttered. "Ah, here we are!" He led them out of a carpeted corridor and up a flight of stairs to view the entrance to the dining hall of the interstellar cruise ship, the_ Hindenburg._

A wave of well-dressed humans and mostly-humanoid aliens was wandering in from the corridor ahead of them, and the four stowaways slipped surreptitiously into the disorganized crowd without anyone noticing.

"Oh my god," Shaun muttered, staring wide-eyed at a two-headed man in front of him.

"Stop it. That's rude," the Doctor scolded. "Donna, will you keep a leash on him?"

"Oh, isn't it just GORGEOUS?" Donna gushed, ignoring them and pushing through the crowd into the dining hall ahead of the others.

The room was huge, larger than a typical ballroom, and the starboard wall was clear as glass – nothing but windows stretching from the floor up to the ceiling, giving a breathtaking panoramic of the stars outside. A hovering chandelier floated over the middle of the room, illuminating the multitude of circular dining tables covered by burgundy table cloths. Humans, aliens, and human-alien hybrids moved gracefully about the room in expensive formal wear, interspersed by buffet stewards and waiters in crisp white uniforms.

The port side wall was decorated with a floor to ceiling map of the three planetary systems the luxury liner operated in. There was a bar there, which Donna took note of for later, and a long buffet table was set up at the back of the room. Beyond that was a sort of raised dais, about chest high, where a small orchestra was playing a combination of stringed instruments from earth and a few alien wind instruments she had never seen.

The Doctor came up next to her elbow looking pleased as punch. "Looks like dinner's just beginning. Hungry?" He pulled out a chair and plopped down at an empty table.

"Just look at this grand old place!" Donna replied, too busy relishing the details to sit down. "It's like some kind of retro-Hindenburg meets scifi-future-tech-thing! Look! Look over there! Oh my god! That's Plavalaguna!"

"Hmm? Who?"

"There! In the blue dress! Or skin. Can't really tell. She's always in that, in her photos. Not sure if it's part of her body or what. She's wildly famous as a singer."

The Doctor shook his head in disbelief. "Donna, this is the 51st century. How can you possibly know who's famous?"

"What do you think I was doing at that leisure planet all day? Sleeping? I read the tabloids like everybody else, dumbo. Oh, look! That bloke over there with the fur thing round his head is trying to chat her up. Oooh, I bet the paparazzi will love that."

"Nahhh, no paparazzi here. This is the highest-class interstellar liner there is. The _Hindenburg _is renowned for its security and privacy. Only the richest and most discreet allowed onboard. It's part of their appeal." He put his hands in his pockets and looked around in a relaxed manner. "Speaking of security," he added after a moment, "The psychic paper won't work here. This is era of the Time Agency. They've already discovered it and it's starting to make the rounds on the more frequented planets. The crew will all have been trained against it."

Donna furrowed her brow, her attention finally torn away from the celebrities. "But it's not like we've got tickets. What if they catch us?"

"Well, I've got more than one trick up my sleeve, don't I? We'll just need to hack the computer system, register ourselves as proper passengers." He pulled the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and twirled it with a cocky grin. "Any preference for aliases?"

Rose caught up with them, trailing Shaun behind her.

Shaun's head swiveled round at each alien they passed, making all sorts of strange grimaces. He nearly bumped into a six-foot walking wall of sludge by not looking where he was going, and let out a little "Agh!"

The Doctor rolled his eyes and got up to lead the troupe in the direction of one of the passengers' public access computer terminals, which were basically touchscreens set into the walls at regular intervals disguised as antique watercolors.

"Worse than Mickey," he muttered.

Rose elbowed him. "Oi! Mickey got better," she whispered back. "Give him a chance to get used to it."

Meanwhile, Donna was running through aliases she might use. "I can be the duchess of the Ood or something… Oh, maybe an unknown but gloriously wealthy heiress from Messaline. What're you gonna be?" she asked Rose.

Rose was still distracted by the Doctor, and wasn't really listening. "Sorry, wha'? Oh, I'm a dame."

"A dame? What do you want to be a dame for? England's probably not even a proper country anymore. What are the odds they still have dames?"

"No, but I am, though," Rose said, laughing.

"Really, she is," the Doctor chimed in. "I was there, got knighted myself."

"Really? How'd that happen? They knight people for being flouncing big weirdos back then? Or I know! You used your unnatural skinniness to slip into a chimney and rescue the king's daughter's favorite kitten?"

...

Lee McAvoy sat alone at a table in the dining hall except for a humpbacked old insectoid-woman who hadn't said a word all evening. A waiter appeared at his elbow with that polite smile one finds everywhere in hospitality industry, and startled him.

"Good evening, sir, and how is everything going tonight?"

Lee glanced up at him, distracted from the datapad he'd just been reading. "F-f-fine, thanks."

"Is there anything I can request from the kitchen that hasn't made it to the buffet table tonight?"

Lee shook his head. "No, I d, d, d, d, d…" He paused, took a breath, held it, and then breathed out slowly and deliberately. "No, t-thank you," he finished. The waiter gave him a wan little smile and he left to go check on the next table.

Around him, people noisily circled the buffet, filtered in from the halls and carried plates to their tables gorged with entrées and hors d'oeuvres from various planets in this quadrant of the galaxy. Lee knew he should get something too, but first he needed to finish going over the programming for the probe's launch one more time. This kind of trip into the field was far too expensive to redo if human error screwed things up via a typo or a misplaced colon in the code, and living as he did on the pittance of a mid-level research associate at a modest university lab, he couldn't afford to try again if the first launch failed and his grant fell through.

He had just gotten through the second page of code when a familiar voice rang out across the hall, the second interruption in five minutes.

"NO! No way! You are KIDDING me!"

The denial was followed by a warm whooping laugh, and Lee felt his body react automatically. He bolted upright and scanned the faces in the crowd just as he had done every time he thought he heard that voice for the last two years.

When he didn't see the thick red hair he was expecting, he kicked himself for being stupid again. He really had to quit doing that. It was like a tic. Hear Donna; Look for Donna. It was obviously all in his head. It didn't seem to matter that no one else had ever seen or heard of Donna Noble outside of the library's records either before or after the evacuation. He still thought of her all the time.

Two years had passed since he got out of the library, and the trauma specialist had warned him that the psychological effects would be long-lasting. He'd missed a hundred years, after all, trapped in that computer. Everyone he knew from his old life was dead. He'd had to go back to university all over again as a student in his own field, despite having been a researcher with a Ph.D. in radiation and energy physics – science had moved on without him during those hundred years – and it had taken a long time to regain lost ground. Finally, he'd caught up on the new theories and discoveries, renewed his credentials, and got a piddling job as a low-ranking researcher in a university lab which would have been beneath him back in the day.

Now he was finally back to doing some of his own research projects, and he was feeling a lot of pressure to succeed with this probe. It was probably triggering old responses to stress; hence, the reaction to whoever that was who had laughed. He would just focus on launching the probe and collecting as many readings as he could before the plasma inevitably got it, and try to dismiss this old fixation as the delusional fantasy it was.

...

Rose surveyed the room of dinner attendees appraisingly as the Doctor entered their fake IDs into the public access computer with a little sneaky sonicking.

"So this is the 51st century, right? Jack's time?"

"Yeah. Why?" he answered, focused on the computer screen.

"He always called it the 'sexy century,'" she mused. "Everyone's good looking, humans have evolved to have special, ultra-strong pheromones…" she trailed off, watching a fit waiter with geranium red hair glide by with a plate of hors d'oeuvres.

The Doctor looked round quickly at this. Rose looked back at him innocently.

"Wha'? Just curious, is all."

The Doctor turned back to the viewscreen, sulking slightly. "This is more than just the 'sexy century.' Important historical events occurred in this era. Humans abandoned the Earth to another ice age, took to the stars, spread across the galaxy for the first time. The Supreme Alliance of the Eastern State discovered time travel, the Time Agency became a thing, the Filipino Army ended World War VI at the Battle of Reykjavik. Law and order essentially collapsed, leaving a million independent nation-states which battled each other for dominance in various sectors of the galaxy. Magnus Greel, war criminal, killed 100,000 in what became known as the Brisbane Dead Zone."

"Sounds ghastly," Donna observed, sipping at a wine glass she'd somehow acquired.

"These people don't look like they've been in a war," Rose noted.

"Well, no. They wouldn't, would they? The rich and the famous. Kept well out of it. Mind you, it wasn't all bad. This century also saw the founding of some of the galaxy's best universities, significant advances in interstellar technology, and a new open-mindedness in humans with regards to alliances and cultural exchange with alien species. Well, as you said, they did do a lot of crossbreeding, which had something to do with it."

"Crossbreeding?" Shaun looked like he was going to be sick. "You mean like, sex with aliens?"

"Yeah."

"With, like, _things, _though?! With these… _creatures_?"

The Doctor looked mildly amused. "He does know I'm an alien, right?" he said to Donna and Rose.

"So why call it the _Hindenburg_?" Donna wanted to know, reverting back to their earlier topic. "Doesn't seem like that name would be all that good for publicity."

"On the contrary, nothing better!" exclaimed the Doctor with a grand gesture around the room. "Everyone's heard of it. And a flashback to the past? Very popular with this crowd. They all left Earth less than a century ago, remember. They get nostalgic, this lot. Look at the details. The paintings, the red upholstery, the giant map on the wall… It's all very accurate and similar to the original. They're very keen on recreating the classics."

"Oh, that's comforting," said Rose, exchanging looks with Donna.

"It is! Well, obviously they don't want to repeat the whole exploding, burning bit. There's no need to worry. This _Hindenburg _is a luxury liner for the wealthy, well known as the safest ship ever made. Its safety measures and redundancies are unmatched. In fact, every single safety-related system has at least three backups, and the lifepods do, too, on a smaller scale, of course. No, the second _Hindenburg_ went on to have a long, successful career, and retired to the interstellar shipyard museum with honors after hundreds of years."

"All right, who have you put us in as?" Donna asked.

"See for yourself," the Doctor said, backing up so she could look at the updated passenger registry.

"Huh. Sir Doctor the 10th of the TARDIS colony, and companions. Looks like I'm Lady Donna of the Tempor Travelus fortune," Donna murmured. "Not feeling very imaginative today, are we?"

"I'm… Shaun Temple, manservant," Shaun read aloud. A slow frown crossed his face. "Hey! How come I'm a manservant?"

"Too unusual, traveling without any servants," the Doctor answered blithely. "Don't want to draw attention to ourselves."

"I like the sound of that," Donna said, holding her pert nose up in the air and adjusting her heavy gemstone necklace again. "Heiress to the Tempor Travelus fortune. Grew up on the classiest planets. Attended all the best schools, naturally. Gold-plated ones, I should think."

The lights dimmed slightly and the orchestra finished their piece as a spotlight appeared on the stage, focused on a podium with another small computer terminal set into it. A crewman in uniform, apparently the maître d', jumped up the steps up the side of the podium and stepped smartly up to the lectern. The ambient sound of conversation in the room died down as the guests settled in to listen to the announcements.

"Vertebrates and invertebrates," he began, "Welcome, all, to dinner. As it is the third evening of our excursion across the Ariadne planetary system, we've arranged a buffet of local delicacies from Ariadne's third outermost populated orbital body, the Gratten Moon, in addition to our standard faire. Special requests may be directed to the buffet stewards. Wine and other consumable spirits will be served until 8:00, at which point dinner will end and our bar will open. You are invited to sample the amenities at our gym and entertainment suites at any time. Please see a porter to be provided with recreational gear suited to your particular species."

He cleared his throat and tapped the touchscreen in the lectern a few times before continuing with a well-practiced smile. "This evening, we have a rare treat in store for everyone, viewable out the starboard windows. As you may be aware, this cruise normally follows a direct route from Insignion Station to Gratten Major, but every seven years, that path conflicts with the orbit of Ariadne's largest gas giant, K'ribb-dees, which is famed for its elegant rings, its lovely rainbow aura, and its natural plasmic pyrotechnics."

Off to Donna's left, a fellow passenger with blue skin and a glittery pirate jacket leaned over and whispered to a walking tree. "That's not all it's famed for," he said in a low voice. "The planet's quarantined. Get too close and _bzzt!_ Plasma bursts. Every time."

The maître d's light voice continued on over the top of the whisperers. "The mysterious K'ribb-dees gives off a large amount of exotic radiation, radiation that frequently sparks X-class plasma bursts, the hottest and most violent type of superheated plasma in the known universe – very deadly, but also very beautiful. The _Hindenburg _will tonight be making a scenic detour around the planet – staying well within government issued safety parameters, of course – and we'll be able to get quite a good view of the aura and rings. At our closest point at perigee, which will occur at 8:00 sharp, a scientific delegate from the University of Aquarii will launch a probe from this ship into the atmosphere of the planet, and the probe's entry into the atmosphere will trigger a rare reactive plasma event. The captain advises guests that the best viewing locations in the ship will be the dining hall, via the starboard windows, and, for the not-so-faint-at-heart, the ballroom on the top deck, which is encompassed on all sides by a seamless dome of crystal clear transparent aluminium. You'll feel you could dance right off the ship and into the stars." The man gave the audience a beatific smile and a slight bow.

"And now," he said, turning with a gesture to the starboard windows, "we'll be turning into our detour route, and the planet will come into view on the starboard side of the ship."

The audience, including team TARDIS, waited patiently for the turn and the planet. There was a funny clunk that echoed up through the floor, and the lights flickered. A small wave of "oh!" and other murmurs of surprise passed through the crowd, but then the lights stabilized and nothing else happened. The maître d' stood there a minute or two more with his hand still out. A sheen of sweat started to appear on his brow.

A couple of crewmen standing on the floor next to the dais frowned, turned away and muttered quietly into their earpieces, and one of them left the room through the corridor marked 'employees only.' The other leapt up to the dais, and whispered something to the maître d'.

The Doctor, closely followed by Rose, scooted up closer to the dais to hear their conversation and caught the tail end of the maître d's quietly hissed response.

"What do you mean, _rebooting_? I've got five hundred people here waiting for a view."

The crewman whispered to him again, and the maître d's reaction was louder than he meant it to be.

"Then turn the bloody ship manually! That's what back-up systems are for!"

The crewman saluted and swung himself back down off the dais before heading out the door after his shipmate. The maître d' glared after him for a moment, then turned abruptly back to the audience, and smiled brightly.

"There will in fact be a short delay. I invite you all to sample the local delicacies while we wait. The orchestra will be playing Gershwin on the ballroom floor from 9:00 to 12:00. Please enjoy your dinner."

With that, he fled off the stage and down the corridor after the crewmen who had passed him the message.

"That's kind of weird," Rose mused.

Shaun nodded, eyes popping out of his head as he stared at the humanoid off to Donna's left. "You can say that again!"

"Not the blue man, you twit," Donna said, tugging his shirtsleeve affectionately. "The fact that the crew is acting funny."

The Doctor gazed after the maître d' with his usual nose for trouble, and pondered the possibilities. Rose, smiling cheekily with her tongue against her upper teeth, watched him out of the corner of her eye.

"S'pose we'll have to investigate, Sarge?"

He glanced back and grinned. "I dunno, Lewis. Could be nothing."

"Could be hideous engine monsters, too."

"Better find out, just to be sure."

"Engine monsters?" Shaun echoed, not sure whether this was an actual thing.

Donna tossed her head. "Right, better go talk to the employees to get the full scoop. Just make us more important in your computer there so they don't shrug us off like regular people." She waved her hand at the computer terminal.

A few quick whirs of the sonic screwdriver later, the four of them headed out of the dining hall down the back corridor in the direction the stewards had gone.


	3. Chapter 2

Shaun was nervous and wondered if they shouldn't just leave any possible engine monsters to the professionals. He wasn't qualified to fight monsters. He was just an HVAC repairman. And Donna was a temp – whatever that alien had done to make her so insanely sure of herself, she certainly wasn't any more qualified than him. And Rose – okay, there was no telling whether Rose was qualified. He'd thought she looked and sounded like some mid-20s estate girl from South London when he first met her, but not a thing she'd said had made an ounce of sense to him since then, other than "hello," and "pass the butter." He had no idea what her work experience was, if any, and she'd clearly been running around with aliens so long that she had no idea what normal human reactions should be anymore. Their disastrous first trip – kidnapping, almost, in his case – to Venice had been the most terrifying, horrible experience of his life, and she'd laughed and called it _romantic_. Like nearly getting murdered by vampires was some kind of double date. He had tried, really tried, to be open-minded about his wife's friends, and had even allowed himself to be taken far out of his comfort zone in the effort to be accommodating, but they didn't seem to be making any similar effort to meet him halfway, and he was feeling rather bitter about it.

Now they were leading him against his better judgment toward a set of doors that were clearly marked 'employees only' on a spaceship full of monsters and bizarre, half-human nightmare creaturesin order to stir up trouble where there was none. They passed a human french-kissing and groping what looked like Big Bird against a wall, and he couldn't help experiencing a jolt of shock and disgust.

"Oh, my god…"

Donna, who was walking beside him, glanced at him, oblivious to the horrifying moral, cultural, and genetic degradation of the future of the human race going on all around them. "What?"

"That bloke! Back there!" Shaun hissed back. "That's disgusting. That's like… that's just… bestiality!"

Donna glanced back and huffed. "Oh, get a grip. They're both sentient lifeforms. They're probably married and on their honeymoon. Honestly."

Somehow it disturbed him even more that Donna didn't seem disturbed at all. What were these people doing to her?

They reached the crewman stationed at the door and pulled up to speak with him. He also turned out to be alien, a fact which only became apparent when he opened his mouth to speak and another tiny mouth came out of his throat where his tongue should have been to do the actual talking. Shaun suffered an immediate, involuntary gag reflex which manifested audibly as a sort of "guh" sound. Donna promptly stomped on his foot, smiled sweetly at the crewman, and made excuses for him.

"Don't mind him, he's just got out of a drug-fueled stupor. Plastic surgery, you know. Looks have improved a fair bit, but he's stoned out of his mind."

The dual-mouthed humanoid's interior mouth opened in an 'O' shape. "Ah," he said with raised eyebrows. "And how can I help you vertebrates?"

"Hello! Yes. I'm the Doctor, Chief Department Head for Transport in the Tri-Galactic area, and I happen to be an engines specialist for Minerva-class luxury liners. I understand you're having some trouble with your starboard rotor, and since we were onboard, thought we might lend a hand. This is my colleague, Rose Tyler, and the woman behind us is a temp who's working for the agency, Donna Noble."

"I'm not a temp, actually. I'm an heiress," she contradicted.

"She's a temp," the Doctor repeated with a knowing nod at the crewman.

"I'm an heiress."

"And who's that?" asked the crewman, eyes moving uncertainly over to Shaun. The Doctor looked over with some surprise.

"Oh. He's, uh… He's an intern. You know how it goes. Powerful uncle, useless nephew, pawns him off on some unsuspecting civil agency just trying to do its job. Can't get rid of him or the whole department loses funding. So, shall we?"

The crewman looked uncomfortable and unwilling to go so far as to admit there was a problem, but he tapped a few commands into the computer interface at his desk, verifying the Doctor's introductions with the ship's register. Finally he picked up a 1930's style receiver from its port in the wall and spoke a few words to the bridge. After a minute, he put it back down and turned to the team.

"The captain would welcome your expertise, and asks that you join him on the bridge."

…

Before they were able to enter the employee only areas, all four of them had to have their bio-signs scanned and entered into the system as approved visitors. The ship's automated security system would set off alerts and trigger a lockdown if anyone without the proper approval set foot outside the passenger areas. It was one of many ways the cruise line assured the safety of its wealthy clientele, who might otherwise be at risk of abductions for ransom.

Once on the bridge, they met Captain Manning, a young chap with a pale, sweaty face and clammy hands. Captain Manning, it turned out, did have several years of experience as a ship's officer, but this was his first voyage as a captain. He'd only just been promoted, and was worried his bosses would think he'd mucked up already. Of course, with his luck, the computer system _would_ suddenly start acting up only three days out of port. This had never happened before on any cruise he'd done. It was practically impossible. They had redundancies for this sort of thing. That was the sort of hand fate held for him. He was feeling rather sorry for himself.

"What happened?" the Doctor asked.

The captain popped an antacid and grimaced. "Ship's navigation and steering's seized up, quit responding to commands. We tried rebooting the whole system, but it came back up blank and now we can't even view our current trajectory."

"What about the back-ups? Ship like this, you must have at least two or three."

"We have, but only our onboard technicians can access them and _both _of them have gone missing. They aren't responding to their pages."

The Doctor looked at him sharply. "Okay, _that's_ a little too inconvenient to be a coincidence."

"Can't you find them with a shipwide scan?" asked Rose. "You must have bio-scanners or something built into each deck, since you registered us on the way in."

"We've tried that," answered the captain. "Either biometrics is acting up or they're not on the ship anymore. Only I don't see how they could've got off." He clutched nervously at his short cropped hair with both hands and returned to pacing the bridge. "We'd get an alert for any ship docking or lifepod ejecting, or… or airlocks opening," he added grimly. "They've got to still be onboard."

"Could be sabotage," said the Doctor. "Other than the technicians, has anyone else disappeared? Crew? Passengers?"

The captain and the bridge crew stared at him in confused disbelief. It was obvious that they hadn't even considered it. "That isn't possible," the captain protested. "It's got to be a malfunction. You don't understand our security systems. No one gets into the vital systems areas without prior approval, and you're the only non-employee we've let in since our official overhaul at our last port of departure."

"Maybe it's an employee."

"No, there's no way. The background checks for employees are… well, let's just say the cruise line is known for being more paranoid than the dictator of Galaxon 6. An employee wouldn't do it, and alarms would've gone off if anyone other than an employee entered a restricted area. The biometric scanning system is perfect. You can't turn it off, and you can't fake biometrics. It's scientifically impossible."

The Doctor inhaled through his nose and tilted his head back thoughtfully. "Weeelll, I can think of a few ways. A plasmavore could do it. Or you could program a force grown clone. Or the easiest way, just slip on a biodamper."

The captain stared at him in horror. "A what?"

"Biodamper." The Doctor popped a ring box out of his pocket and gestured at it. "Blocks all bio-signs. Ship's security system wouldn't even recognize anyone was standing there at all, would see just a lifeless room. I've got one here." He opened his box, but it was empty. "Ah, right. Donna has it."

"No, I haven't," Donna denied flatly with a shake of her head.

"What?" The Doctor turned to look at her in dismay. "What'd you do with it?"

"Well, it reminded me of Lance, didn't it? Chucked it in the secondhand bin at Barnardo's."

"That was a perfectly good biodamper, Donna!" he complained. She shrugged.

Captain Manning interrupted them. "Hold on. Nothing can block bio-signs. There's no such thing."

The Doctor just looked at him patiently. "Sure, there is. Would've been invented… Oh, this is 12th of May, 5145, so let's see… Five months ago? The first prototypes should just be hitting the black markets now."

The captain stared at him in horror. "You're saying with a… a biodamper, any of the passengers could have gotten into the restricted areas and they wouldn't even show up on the computer scan?"

"Yeah. You got your entire crew and passenger list accounted for?"

The rather alarmed crew stood frozen for a second. Then Captain Manning turned and started giving orders to check all bio-signs currently being monitored against the passenger and crew list, and find out how many people had disappeared off the biometrics scans.

The Doctor used this opportunity to start looking over the frozen steering program on the nav computer. He tapped a few buttons experimentally, then knelt down, removed the panel covering the computer terminal's primary hardware, and started sonicking things inside.

"Sir, we can't find four of the passengers. It's the Sullivan party in 36C," one of the crewmen announced.

The captain spoke into his comm link and gave orders for the cabin stewards on the passenger deck to get down to that suite and check it out, _quietly_. In the meantime, crewmen in the dining hall and on the top deck reported in that no passengers matching the Sullivan party's descriptions were in either place.

The captain downed two more antacids and paced the bridge. "Oh my god, oh my god…"

Feeling sympathetic, Rose patted him on the shoulder. "Look, why don't you get the passengers involved and do a shipwide search? Hand out photos and ask everyone to report in if they see them. Biodampers won't make the wearer invisible, after all."

The captain stared back at her in horror. "Are you kidding? People will know something's wrong. There will be a panic. And the Minerva Cruiseline's selling point is its absolute safety. It's more than my job's worth to harm the reputation of the company."

The Doctor got the nav computer unfrozen just then and picked himself up off the floor where he'd been kneeling. "Right! Now that _that's _working again, let's see where you're taking us."

He entered in some commands, and Rose, Donna, and a few nearby officers peered over his shoulders to watch.

"We're on our original course through the K'ribb-dees orbital path, already pretty far inside the official danger zone… Stay on this, and we'll pass within kilometers of the planet's outer rings. Can't have that…" He tapped a few more buttons, and a pop-up window appeared on the screen and beeped at him.

COURSE ALTERATION UNSAFE. NOT RECOMMENDED.

"Really," the Doctor remarked dryly at the computer, "Except our current one isn't all that safe either. Let's try this again, shall we?" He plotted a different detour.

COURSE ALTERATION UNSAFE. NOT RECOMMENDED.

He hummed. Rose shot him a sidelong glance. "Doctor? What if our course doesn't get corrected? Will we crash?"

"Ohhhh, I shouldn't think so. The rings look thick, but where we'll end up is mostly dust. The shields can handle it. I'd be more worried about the radiation."

"We can handle the radiation, sir, if it comes to that," said the ship's first mate. "The _Hindenburg_'s got the best shields in this quadrant of the galaxy. She can withstand radiation levels up to Oseidon level if necessary, but that's not the biggest worry. The plasma bursts are."

The Doctor looked at him in surprise. "What? Plasma bursts won't go out that far. There's nothing to ionize outside the planet's atmosphere."

The bridge officers exchanged glances. The captain looked like he was going to be sick. The first mate leaned forward and, in a low voice, explained. "There's something weird about K'ribb-dees. Fifty years ago, a royal envoy from Draconia was passing through this system. This was back when their emperor was an empress, and she was on 'er way back from some diplomatic function. Somethin' went wrong, and they stopped responding to subspace communications. The ship was late returnin', and the radiation from the planet was messin' up radio contact, so the Draconians sent some ships to go see what 'ad 'appened. The ship was just lying there, dead, in the rings, shields fried, and no response. When the salvage teams went in to try to tow it out, they say, the planet started shootin' plasma bursts at 'em. They weren't even as close as the rings yet."

Donna and Rose listened with interest, fascinated by the ghost-story whispers the crewman had fallen into while telling it, and the way the other officers in the bridge all nodded solemnly in agreement. The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "Okay. That's odd. Has anyone looked into why?"

"There have been probes, sir, but they're all shot down as soon as they enter the danger zone. There's a reason the planet's been quarantined. And the plasma bursts only 'appen when some ship or asteroid or somethin' flies by, and then the plasma will reach out like an arm from the planet's depths, and just, BOOM!" He clenched his outstretched hand into a fist in a dramatic interpretation of a conscious malevolent planet destroying a helpless spacefarer. "Something's living there, sir. It's said the plasma's some kind of weapon."

"Whose weapon?" the Doctor asked, matching him hushed whisper for hushed whisper.

"The ghosts of K'ribb-dees."

The Doctor blinked at him for a moment, then waved a hand dismissively. "Ghosts? Nahhhh, no such thing as ghosts."

"But there is, sir! There's no life signs on K'ribb-dees. Nothin' lives there. Barely even a biomass reading in the atmosphere, bacteria and such. But someone's shooting at anyone who trespasses its orbit."

The Doctor let out a sigh and leveled a stern but patient look at the nervous crew. "Look, let's all just put the 'ghosts' theory on hold for the moment, and focus on getting our steering back. Whoever sabotaged the nav computer clearly knew what they were doing, so I'll have to do a system restore to get it working again, and I'll need someone to manually disconnect the maneuvering thrusters in the propulsion section so we don't take off like a Didonian sand beast once the automatic system check kicks in."

The captain directed a look at one of the officers, who saluted and left the bridge.

"Rose, Donna" the Doctor added, turning to his companions, "Oh, and, er….. Shaun. Go ask around and find out if anyone's seen those missing passengers. I'm gonna stay here and work on getting the steering back online."

"Yeah. On it." Rose nodded and headed for the door. Donna turned after her, followed by a dismayed Shaun.

"Oh, but don't draw attention to yourselves!" the Doctor called after them. "They're probably the saboteurs. We can't let them know we're on to them. Just keep an eye out and don't do anything risky."

"All right! We know what we're doing," Donna shouted back from the hall, shaking her head at him even though he couldn't see her. "We're not exactly new at this, you idiot."

…

In the hall, Rose caught her heel on the carpet and narrowly avoided an undignified face-plant.

"Damn," she muttered.

"What's wrong?" Donna asked.

"I can't run in these," Rose explained. "Look, I'm gonna just pop back to the TARDIS and change first. Meet you back in the dining room?"

"Right. See you in a bit."

Rose turned and headed for the stairs leading down to the deck below, where they'd left the TARDIS, and Donna and Shaun continued on into the dining hall. The crewman guarding the employee entrance stopped them and gave them a paper-thin data pad as they passed.

"Here you are, ma'am. The bridge sent this down for you."

"Cheers. Let's have a look."

She tapped the screen and brought up the basic info on the four missing passengers: three men and one woman. It included their names, port of origin, cabin number, and photo IDs. The photos looked like pretty standard humanoids – almost normal, from Shaun's point of view, except for the unnaturally high foreheads and the fact that the woman wore a towering blonde beehive hairstyle. She was almost pretty, in a kitschy 1960's sort of way.

"Patty Sullivan, movie producer, origin New Atlantis," Donna read aloud. "Traveling with her 'executive assistants,' Joe, Dick, and Harry. Let's see if any of the passengers have seen them."

She waved down what looked like a bipedal carrot and asked about the photos, but he hadn't seen them. She tried a human couple and a Tree of Cheem next, but they didn't have anything for her either. A lady with a pink terrier recognized two of the blokes, but said she hadn't seen them since breakfast, when they'd passed her on the way to the tennis courts.

"What now?" Shaun asked.

Donna sighed and looked around. "Ask someone else, I suppose." Something on the buffet table caught her eye. "Oh, look! Is that Jovian sandbeetle kimchi?" Delighted, she reached for a cracker with some kind of red shavings on top and popped it into her mouth.

Shaun made a frustrated sound and looked away.

"What?" Donna asked.

"Nothin'. It's just, look at you! You don't even like kimchi."

"Yes, I do. 'Course I like it."

"You never did before! You won't even eat calamari. And now you're scoffing down alien beetles and kimchi like you're some whole different person."

"What on earth has got into you?" Donna stared at him. "So I like it now! As a matter of fact, I got a taste for it when I was traveling with the Doctor. It was the local snack on, on, oh what was it, Planet Zog or something, that place with all those fancy sunhats. What's it matter? It's just food."

Irritated, Donna turned away and sucked the crumbs off her fingers. She wasn't exactly thrilled to keep surprising him either, but what could she do? Shaun had met her after she'd already traveled the universe, seen terrible and wonderful things, widened her horizons, and come to find her own place in it all, but he didn't _get_ any of that. How could he? She felt like she had lost a good ten or twelve months of her life being brainwiped, walking around without a clue as to what she'd done and learned, and missing out on all the amazing things out there that she could have been exploring and experiencing. Now, all she wanted to do was to make up for lost time. She couldn't help it if he was going to fall to pieces every time she took a bite of something new.

With a little sniff, she shoved that thought aside. There was no point in picking at old scabs. The Doctor had done the only thing he knew to keep her alive, and she was fine now. Better to focus on the present and really enjoy herself.

She held up her head and picked out her next likely witness among the crowd in the dining hall.

…

Lee McAvoy had been in the aft airlocks, giving the probe a final once-over, and was just walking back into the dining hall to actually follow through on his earlier intention to eat something when he saw her.

Donna Noble, _his _Donna Noble, was standing by the starboard windows talking to an Avian Varosian, her ginger hair glowing in the chandelier's light, gems sparkling round her neck, smile on her face as she nodded and laughed.

Something seized up in his chest and he stopped, frozen to the spot.

It was really her. Not someone who sounded like her. Not his imagination. She was really here. He knew her face perfectly. He saw it vividly in his memory all the time.

"_Donna? What's happening?"_

"_I don't know, but it's not real. Nothing here's real. The whole world, everything. None of it's real!"_

"_Am I real?"_

"_Of course you're real! I know you're real. Oh god, oh god, I hope you're real!"_

They been pulled apart then, faded into the light as everyone's emergency teleportation process had finally completed itself, a hundred years late. Her last words echoed through his head.

"_I'll find you! I promise you, I'll find you!"_

He'd been holding onto that promise for two years since those last moments in the library, when he'd finally glimpsed her in the crowd of evacuees and tried to call to her, but couldn't get her name out in time. Unlike the rest of that dream, she _had_ been real. He'd already known it, felt it somehow even in the false reality. He'd been real, too, it turned out, something that he'd been less sure of up to that point, but it hadn't done them any good. He'd called to her, but got stuck on that first consonant, and hadn't been able to get off the teleportation pad in time to reach her in person.

He'd materialized on the emergency transit station with the others and waited for her to come through with the next group, but she hadn't. He'd been shuffled along into counseling and social reintegration programs with the other victims, and kept looking for her, but didn't see her then either. He checked visitor notices, hoping maybe she'd gotten out another way and would come find him like she'd said, but she never had.

He'd never resented his stammer so much in his life, that one time it was so important to just get the word out and he couldn't do it. It had haunted him.

More than that, her promise to find him had haunted him.

Perhaps it was that the computer had matched them well according to their traits, or perhaps they were both just lonely enough to be content to time-skip straight into marriage, but they'd been happy, very happy. In particular, he'd been really, _really_ happy.

…_Had_ she been happy?

Suddenly plagued by second thoughts, he turned away. What if she'd been repelled by the idea once she'd gotten Dr. Moon out of her head? She hadn't gone searching for him after all, and he'd been easy to find. Maybe she hadn't meant what she'd promised in the virtual world. Maybe it was just the computer putting words into her mouth – or maybe she had meant it at the time, but once she was out and the dreamlike haze of being in the computer had faded, maybe she'd laughed it off, or regretted it, or felt uncomfortable about it, and god, should he maybe avoid her?

He looked back at her in a panic, then turned away again, then turned back to convince himself she was still there, then thought maybe he had better just hide, or look away and look busy, or, _oh shit, too late_, she was turning, she'd seen him, her eyes suddenly flashed recognition, her jaw dropped open, she broke into a smile, started to walk over, _oh god!_


	4. Chapter 3

"Yeah, so you saw them, then?" Donna prompted. The feathery woman she was speaking to seemed to get distracted easily.

"All four of them stepped into the lift together and went down. But that was around 3:00. I don't know where they are now, sorry."

"No, that's wonderful. That's the most recent sighting we've heard yet. Thanks very much." Donna turned away with a smile which turned into a sigh and a tired eye roll as soon as she was facing the other way. She wasn't making enough progress with the search. She scanned the room for anyone else who might know something, half-considering just leaving the room to do her own deck to deck search, and caught sight of a familiar man in a charcoal suit staring at her, openmouthed.

Donna's jaw dropped.

He was real. Oh, my god. He was real after all. And all this time, she'd thought he was just in her head. She never thought she'd see him again. Lee McAvoy. _'Welcome home, M-Mrs. McAvoy,'_ a voice echoed in her head. She was absolutely gobsmacked. A memory hit her, him with the kids, laughing. Him watching TV with his socks on the coffee table. Him taking her fishing, and her with her coat on, plus three more layers of knit jumpers, and a sarcastic quip about the next ice age on her lips. He'd kissed it off before she got it out.

A grin slowly spread across her face. She couldn't believe it! He was real after all! And here! Of all places, of all times in the universe, to run into him again! She shook her head and blinked, and he was still there. She couldn't bloody believe it!

Of course she was going over there to talk to him. Oh, how bonkers was this?! She knew him instantly! In real time, she'd only known him for a matter of hours, or even less, but looking at him standing there awkwardly on the other side of the room with his mouth working and nothing coming out, she felt she'd known him all of her adult life.

Suddenly, a wet blanket appeared in the form of her husband and threw itself over the proceedings.

"Who's that, then?" Shaun asked, having apparently materialized out of nowhere next to her ear, chewing loudly on some kind of finger-sandwich from the buffet.

Right, she was married. Forgot about that. Wait, that didn't come out right. Did she really just think that? _Happily_ married. She was _happily_ married. And here he was, Shaun Temple, fit, faithful, well off (well, they both were well off, thanks mainly to the Doctor's little lottery-winning wedding gift), and traveling the universe with her, spending quality time with her on the things she liked. _They_ liked. Okay, _she_ liked, but he would come to like it. She was sure of it.

"Oh, that's Lee. Old friend of mine. Want to go say hello? I'll introduce you." Her smile had momentarily faltered, but she pushed it back into place and led the way over to Lee.

Lee saw them coming and balked a little. Okay, hiding was out. What did one say to a woman one had loved and fantasized about for two years after a sentient planet-sized computer de-molecularized both your bodies and kept your conscious minds in a manipulated dreamlike state for over a century? Pleased to see you, will you marry me? Sorry about the brainwashing into marriage thing, and oh, by the way, I never really came out of it? Glad you're not a fake person after all?

"Lee?!" Donna exclaimed in disbelief, throwing her arms out for a hug. "Lee McAvoy?! I don't believe it!" He awkwardly hugged her back, half panicked smile on his face. He was rather acutely aware of her well-endowed bosom pressed against his chest.

"I never thought I'd ever see you again!" she continued. "I thought you were all in my head! You are really real! Look at you!" She stepped back to do so.

"Hello, D, D, D, D—"

"Your name _is_ Lee, isn't it?" she said suddenly, frowning. "I looked for you in the library database after everyone got out, but I couldn't find anyone with your name."

"Uh, yeah," he nodded. He considered explaining that his full name was Leopold McAvoy-Stewart, but he was still working on getting the word 'Donna' out and didn't think he'd have much luck at it.

"Oh, sorry, I'm being rude. This is Shaun. He's my husband, just married. We're on our honeymoon," she smiled, holding up their hands to show off the rings.

"C-congratulations." Oh sure, he got THAT one out with only minimal stuttering. Two years late. Bloody stammer.

Donna grinned brightly, glancing between the two of them. Shaun gave him a half-hearted smile and looked off to the right, rather bored.

"So what are you doing here?" Donna asked, patting his arm fondly. "Vacation? Romantic cruise?"

"No, I'm a r-r-r-researcher, Aquarii University."

She snorted. "Your university springs for you to ride luxury liners as a work expense? _I_ need a job like that!"

Lee reacted with a flushed, awkward smile. "No… n-n-not usual. The ship p-p-passes by the gas giant. Gonna send a p, p, p, p, p…" he paused for a second, closed his eyes, took a breath and started over. "A p-probe. Radiation readings." Oh, he was in high form tonight. The more nervous he felt, the worse it got. Donna, on the other hand, looked perfectly at ease.

"What for?"

"Oh, you know… S-s-science."

She smiled. "You should meet my friend. You get him started on science, he'll talk your ear off for days. He's around here somewhere." She looked around the room as if she expected him to pop in suddenly.

Shaun cleared his throat. "Well, I'm gonna go grab another sandwich. Good luck with your search, babe."

She looked confused for a moment, then shook her head. "Oh, right. The search. Yeah."

The new husband wandered off toward the buffet table. Lee watched him go with a cooled expression.

"How d-d-d-did you meet?" he managed, and felt relatively pleased with how calm and normal that question almost sounded.

"Oh, I was temping, you know, at his office, and he kept lookin' over at me, so I brought him a coffee." Her gaze grew distant and she frowned suddenly, like she'd just thought of something. "Actually, that's… I never thought of it before, but that's just like how my previous relationship started."

She must have caught something in his face, because then she added, "My last _real life_ relationship before that, I mean."

"Right," he said quickly.

"Yeah."

He swallowed. "I w-wouldn't… c-c-count us as…"

"No, 'course not."

"'Cos that was just the c-c-comp—"

"The computer, yeah," she finished for him.

"Not real."

"No."

"Like b-b-b-brainwashing," he suggested.

"Sure. Of course."

They stood awkwardly for a while after that, each trying to think of a graceful way out of this increasingly uncomfortable conversation. Finally, Donna spoke first.

"I, erm, I'd better go back to see that Shaun doesn't eat something stupid and kill himself. He doesn't know to check for the safe-for-human-consumption labels."

"R-right. Nice t-talking to you."

"Yeah. Same."

She turned back toward the buffet and Lee beat a hasty retreat from the room.

Well, so much for his appetite. He wasn't really sure where he was going, but anywhere had to be better than here, at least until he could get his flustered thoughts back in order and be sure he wasn't going to make a fool of himself. He found himself climbing the old-fashioned spiral staircase up to the top deck where he could stare out into space without the added obstruction of walls or window frames to clutter everything up.

He kept telling himself to try to forget it. He'd been ridiculous all this time, keeping an eye open for her. Stupidly expecting that "I'll find you," uttered in a moment of panic and confusion would have any sort of meaning once the computer was out of her head. It was so obvious in retrospect. Nothing else in that world had been real. Why should her feelings have been any different? It was just the programming. He was the weird one to have taken it so seriously. He was a joke, really. A desperate fool clinging to his own delusions to avoid the painful truth: he was well and truly alone in the universe. Lee stared out across the expanse between the _Hindenburg _and the massive, multicolored rings of K'ribb-dees, and let out a choked, hollow laugh.

One deck below him, Donna Temple-Noble sat down next to Shaun and stared into her own kind of space with a vague sense of disquiet. She'd gotten such a rush from that first sight of Lee across the hall that she'd somehow assumed he'd be just as thrilled to find her again, and somehow, his reaction left her a bit irritated. What _really_ bugged her was that whole 'computer brainwashing' bit. What the hell was that? He made it sound like he didn't miss her at all! She wasn't sure why that annoyed her so much – she had Shaun now, anyway – but honestly! She'd been a complete mess after the library, and that git damn well should have had the decency to suffer too. Bloody wanker!

…

Rose headed down the corridor looking for a stairwell to take her down to where they'd left the TARDIS. She needed to find Donna, but if she knew the Doctor (and of all the humans in the galaxy, she was probably the foremost expert on all things Doctor-related by this point), there was no way this evening was gonna end without some sort of running, fighting aliens thing, and she didn't feel like using the osteo-regenerator in the TARDIS infirmary to repair a broken ankle again. It wouldn't take a minute to grab a pair of trainers for herself and an extra pair for Donna on the way back to the dining hall.

She remembered the TARDIS was only a floor below them in storage section C, so she grabbed a passing crewman with an unusually oblong head to confirm where she was.

"Oh, hello! Sorry," she started, "but I've got to pick up something from storage section C. Could you point me in the right direction?"

The crewman responded with a weird, nervous-looking grimace and shook his head.

"Listen, I know I don't look like I belong back here, but I'm with the Doctor," she persisted. "He's talking to the captain right now. I've been scanned in, so it's fine."

"Er, it's… one floor up," the crewman said, and moved to pass around her. Rose stepped back into his way again, frowning, her instincts up.

"No, it's not. We came upstairs from storage to get to the dining hall, and that's on the same deck as the bridge."

"Yeah, er, that's what I meant. I'm new," the man said, and tried to duck around her again.

She turned after him as he passed, definitely suspicious now. "So new you don't even know where storage is? Oi, hold on a second!"

He whirled around about ten feet ahead of her and pulled an energy gun out of his uniform jacket. Rose's eyes widened and she dived for the floor, but there was no cover in the hall and the end of the hall was about 3 seconds too far away. His first shot hit the wall behind where she'd been standing.

She lunged forward, hoping to tackle him at the knees, but his recharge time was too fast and she took the second shot head on.

The familiar feeling of a stun-gun blast crawled over her and she face-planted into the floor. _Well, shit, _she thought as the darkness overtook her. Not even two minutes out the door. She'd never live this down.

Everything faded to black.


	5. Chapter 4

Donna was still busy brooding about Lee when the Doctor popped up out of nowhere and launched immediately into a fast-paced monologue.

"Donna! The problem is worse than I thought. Definitely sabotage. We got through the computer system only to find the saboteurs had already beaten us to the propulsion sections and mucked up the maneuvering thrusters to the extent that they can't be repaired. The crew's working on getting spare thrusters out of storage now – how well prepared is that, having a full set of spare thrusters? - but swapping them out will take a good twenty minutes at the least, and meanwhile we're on course for the gas giant with no idea what they plan to do once we get there, and no way to know what other damage they might be doing in the meantime. How's your search going, by the way?"

Donna, brow still furrowed, hadn't looked away from her steady stare across the room at the door Lee had exited throughout this whole spiel. Bloody gorgeous wanker waltzing in and out of her life…

The Doctor blinked at her and leaned in close to her face. "…Donna?"

She started, gave a little gasp, and glared at him in annoyance.

"What?" she demanded. "I'm busy!"

The Doctor bounced impatiently on his toes and looked annoyed. "The saboteurs. Have you heard anything? They must have faked their identities to get onboard as passengers. No other way to board the ship, security being what it is. Well, except for us, we've got the TARDIS. Donna, I need your mobile!"

He held out his hand and twitched his fingers.

Donna looked down at his hand, narrowed her eyes in suspicion, and didn't move. "Why?"

"I'm going to turn it into a sort of temporary anti-biodamper by altering the frequency of the radiation it emits so that we can carry out a search of the ship for the fake passengers before they do any more damage."

"Why can't you use your phone?" Donna asked, still not budging.

"I would! I haven't got it on me!"

"Well, where is it?"

"I left it in the TARDIS."

"You left it in the TARDIS? What point is there in having one if you never carry it?"

"Donna, just—!" He pulled his hair in frustration. "Rose! Where's Rose?" He looked around wildly.

Donna leaned back in her chair and gave him a skeptical look. "I haven't seen her since we left the bridge, but she hasn't got her mobile either. No handbag. And trust me, I'd know if she was hiding it in her dress. That fabric doesn't hide a thing."

The Doctor suddenly spun back to her, alarmed.

"What? That was more than fifteen minutes ago. It doesn't take fifteen minutes to get out here from the bridge. Where else could she have gone?"

Donna crossed her arms. "She said she was going to the TARDIS. Perhaps she tried calling and left you a voicemail," she suggested dryly.

The Doctor, ignoring this remark, paced the floor, eyes scanning the room for any glimpse of blonde hair and wine-coloured fabric. Finding none, he came back over to Donna with exasperation written all over his face.

"Why does no one ever listen to me? Don't wander off, don't draw attention to yourselves, don't touch the glowing alien rock. Ten quid she's gotten herself into trouble of some kind."

Donna rolled her eyes. "Well, I'm not taking that bet. Can't the ship find her? Bio-scans or whatever?"

The Doctor darted over to an open access computer, quickly typed something, and then buzzed the sonic at it. "No. No bio-signs matching hers on the ship. The biodampers again, probably. She must have run across the saboteurs."

Donna hurried over behind him, now worried. "What? What'll they do? Wait, you can find her. Here's my phone—!" She pulled her little handbag off her shoulder and started to fumble through it.

"Don't bother, no time to tinker now," the Doctor interrupted. "And anyway, to find Rose, I don't need it." He was already holding his sonic screwdriver up to his face, squinting as he adjusted the settings, tongue poking out a little in concentration. Satisfied with the adjustments, he clicked it on with its usual blue light and high-pitched whirr. Using both hands, he slowly waved it side to side in a sweeping motion reminiscent of water dowsing, picked up on some sort of reading, and set off down the hall out of the dining room at a brisk pace. Donna hurried after him, concern written across her features.

"There are only two sources of huon radiation in the universe right now, both on this ship," he explained, "The TARDIS and Rose. And biodampers don't block huon. Remember when we met?"

"Pencil in a mug, how could I forget?" Donna smirked, running after him down the corridor. Neither of them remembered to call Shaun, left behind in the dining hall.

…

Donna and the Doctor traced Rose to the ship's water filtration and reclamation room, which was dimly lit with orange-tinted industrial lights and sported many big heavy-duty pipes all over the place. They snuck closer and peered round the door.

Inside, they saw a crewman – ship's security, it looked like – tied to a wheely chair with his head lolling drunkenly on his shoulders, being slowly pushed back and forth like a shopping trolley by a grey-bearded lizard man with a tall, oblong head. Two other crew members lay passed out on the floor beyond him – the technicians, in all probability. A second lizard man with a thin black goatee lounged in obvious boredom against a water tank a little ways to the right. The Draconians and the technicians all wore large green and black braces on their wrists. The security guard did not.

"Draconians," the Doctor whispered to Donna. "Usually quite honourable. I dunno what they want to sabotage the ship for. This is out of character for them. By the way, see the biodamper?" He tapped his wrist, indicating the wristbands. "Makes them practically invisible to the ship's computers. To bridge scans, it probably looks like security's walking back and forth, making its rounds as normal. Clever."

They peered a little more to the left, and saw Rose handcuffed to a folding chair, a matching biodamper clamped on one of her wrists. She was busy being cheeky to the guards.

"Oh, you think you're so clever hidin' down 'ere. Well, you better hide. 'Cos you're rubbish at sneakin' around, I can tell you. Seven decks on the ship, and you can't even do the research to learn what's on each one. Three words, and I pegged you, and I wasn't even lookin'."

The lizard men ignored her. Rose leaned her head back and cast her voice over to the right, to someone else who was apparently in the room out of sight of the door.

"You hear that, princess? Your goons here are idiots."

"Silence!" commanded an irritated female voice. There were footsteps, and an imperious-looking human woman with a tall forehead and a blonde beehive strode into view. "Your nattering does you no good, and tests my patience. If you will not cease, you will be drugged like your friend and made to be silent."

"Yeah, and what drug is that?" Rose asked warily, a little more cautious but still hoping to get some good information out of her.

"Keep talking, and find out!" the woman hissed. She whirled away.

Rose turned her attention to the tied up security guard, who had now been left to rest in his chair a few feet away from her.

"Hey," she said in a low voice to get his attention. "You alright, mate?"

He opened one eye dreamily. "Wha'?"

"Are you alright?"

"Who're you?" he slurred.

"My name's Rose. I'm here with some friends, and we're going to get you out of here."

"Out of where?"

"Out of this mess," she said, lips quirked up a little at the corners. "You're tied up in the pipe room."

"What pipe room?"

"On the _Hindenburg._ Your ship."

"My wha'? I have a ship?" He tried to get up, but the bonds held him. "Hey, why can't I move my arms?"

"You're tied up."

"Why'dja do that for?" he asked accusingly.

"I didn't! It was the lizard people," she said, starting to feel a little exasperated. She jerked her head in the direction of the guards, and the man looked, then widened his eyes in alarm.

"I don't remember no lizard people!" He looked around and started when he saw them. "What the—! What do they want? Where's Marcy?"

Rose didn't know who Marcy was, and decided it wasn't worth asking.

The Draconians huddled together to review some sort of message on a data-pad.

"Princess, our course is steady. Rendezvous with the outer rings will occur in fifteen minutes." The older Draconian saluted the beehive woman.

"Good," she replied. She reached up to her shoulder and pinched a button on her brooch that made her human skin and hair flicker and then vanish, revealing the lizard skin beneath. "It is time we left this hole and finished what we came for. Begin stage two!"

The older of the two male Draconians responded to this with an immediate formal bow. The younger gave a sullen glance at his companion and then made a perfunctory bow of his own. "Yes, Princess."

The younger moved over to a valve built into the main water pipe leading out of the filtration tank, and pulled a large injection flask out of his jacket. He opened up the valve and hooked the flask up to the input line.

"This will neutralize the crew and any passengers who might get heroic ideas about interfering with us," he said, opening it to inject the flask's contents into the freshly filtered water.

From their hiding place near the door, the Doctor and Donna watched this new development with dismay. Donna turned to the Doctor, worried.

"The put something in the water. What was that?"

"I don't know," he answered, "but that water is used all over the ship – taps, cooking, even for fuel. We've got to shut it off before it hits the propulsion section, or we don't know what it could do."

"Can you do that from here?"

"I'm gonna try. You go warn the captain and crew about the water – don't let anyone start drinking it or bathing in it. I'll free Rose and see what I can do from here about stopping the flow and reversing it back into the filtration tanks."

Donna nodded and took off running back down the corridor they'd come from, towards the stairs leading back to the dining hall.

Unnoticed by either her or the Doctor, the fourth saboteur, still in his mammalian disguise, was just stepping out of the engineering lounge on that level and saw her run by. His eyes narrowed, and he abruptly changed direction to follow her towards the dining hall stairs where she'd escaped.

Donna burst into the dining hall barely out of breath, and bellowed at the top of her lungs.

"Everyone stop drinking the water! It's been poisoned! There's something in it!"

Guests stared at her in shock. A concerned older woman turned and reached out a tentative hand toward her.

"My dear, are you all right? I do believe you're drunk!"

Ignoring her, Donna staggered over to the nearest buffet steward and grabbed him by the lapels.

"Listen, get up to the bridge and tell the captain or whoever to turn off all the water! It's been contaminated!" she ordered him.

He stammered at her, eyes wide. "W-What?"

"Don't gape at me like fish! GET MOVIN'!" she shouted. He stumbled backward and then took off for the bridge.

Around her, the other passengers had started giggling nervously and remarking over what a strange woman this was who had just popped in out of the blue and started yelling crazy things. The water had been poisoned? How absurd! This was a Minerva Cruiseline vessel! They had the best security in the galaxy!

The mood in the room was too light for her to be taken seriously. Donna whirled around, looking for Shaun. She found him still sitting at a table with his feet up on the chair next to his, lounging back with a wine glass in his hand. She marched over to him and with some surprise, was joined by Lee on the way.

Lee had slipped back down to the dining hall a few minutes earlier in a third attempt to collect some dinner, and was alarmed by Donna's sudden dramatic pronouncement. Instinctually, he found himself running over to her.

Donna looked at the two of them, her earlier strop forgotten, and said in an urgent tone, "The saboteurs have captured Rose, and they've put something in the water! We've got to stop these people drinking it!"

Shaun laughed a little sloppily, and held up his wine glass. "I hardly think anyone here's drinking _water!_"

Donna realized he was more than slightly sloshed, and felt a rush of annoyance wash over her.

Just then, she noticed a familiar face enter the room from the employee only corridor. He had a long, tapered forehead and his hand was hovering around a small black box on his belt as his eyes scanned the room for her.

"Oh, blimey!" she exclaimed, ducking suddenly. "That's one of them! Get down, get down, quick!" Pulling Lee with her, she dove under Shaun's table for cover.

…

**So, I know Draconians in the show were originally very male dominated, but that was two or three thousand years before this takes place, so I'm playing it like their culture evolved during that time to be more gender equal. In fact, I'm also gonna just pull this historical retcon out of thin air here: **

**Sometime in the 48****th**** century or so, a Draconian emperor died without a clear heir, leading to a dynastic war over two rival lineages, during which both legal male heirs died, and this all ended with the first female emperor of Draconia. She, too, had no male heirs, and so left the throne to her daughter, beginning a new tradition, and the throne has been passed down matrilineally ever since, until 50 years ago, when the empress died in the rings of K'ribb-dees, and a revivalist faction took over and placed a new male emperor on the throne instead of the empress's daughter. This is not particularly relevant to our heroes' perspective on events happening now so I won't bother explaining it in the actual story, but in case you were wondering, there it is. **

**TL;DR - I wanted a lizard princess who wasn't Silurian, so I made one up.**


	6. Chapter 5

The Doctor feigned a confused stroll into the room and looked around brightly.

"Oh, this isn't the rec room. Where have I ended up?"

Rose heard his voice and a wave of relief washed over her. The princess drew back her lips and hissed through her teeth.

"What fool is this?"

"Awful lot of pipes and things for a gymnasium. Oh, and Draconians! Fancy that! I didn't know we had any Draconians on board. I had a roommate once who was Draconian. Was always making that Kartian Lungfish Fondue that's so popular in the Spiridon sector. Stank up the apartment something awful. Weeelll, I say apartment. It was more like a minimum security prison cell, but we were on Valera. Progressive sort, Valerans. A prison cell on Valera is nicer than an upscale loft in a major city on some planets. My roommate certainly thought so. Kept committing minor crimes just to get back in. I'm the Doctor, by the way."

While he rambled, seeming completely relaxed, the Doctor pretended to wander aimlessly into the room with his hands stuffed in his suit pockets, taking in the pipes and orange lighting with a smile. Meandering backwards, he casually approached the water filtration controls.

"How did you get back here?" the Princess demanded. "You're not with the crew!"

"Oh, I got my hand stamped!" the Doctor answered gaily. "They let you go anywhere with a hand stamp. Lots easier than sneaking around with a biodamper and a glamour circuit, wouldn't you say, Rose?"

"Oh, lots," Rose agreed, grinning. "Tried it both ways. Stamps are much more comfortable."

"Course," he continued, "the biodamper's got the advantage when your goal is to hijack a high-security cruise ship full of the rich and famous and drive it into a planet full of exotic radiation."

The Draconian henchmen had their stun-guns trained on the Doctor by now, and the Princess smiled unpleasantly, back on comfortable ground.

"And is your goal to stop me?" she inquired.

"I'd just like to know why you're doing it," the Doctor admitted. "Draconians used to be all about honour. Can't see how holding a group of wealthy civilians for ransom fits into that picture."

"That isn't our intention at all," the lizard princess retorted, offended. "We are merely borrowing the ship in an act of desperation. The _Hindenburg _has the best shields of any ship in this sector of the galaxy, far better than any group of ill-funded resistance fighters could afford. We need those shields to take us to the wreck of the _Jogran's Courage_, which we will tow out of the planet's outer rings and return to Draconia as proof of the usurper's treachery."

"Ohhhh, the shipwrecked royal envoy!" He beamed happily at the revelation. "So that's what you're after! But that doesn't make any sense. It's been fifty years since your people lost that ship. Surely you should've been able to do something about retrieving it before now."

"The Draconian council of elders will not fund any investigation!" she snarled, nostrils flaring in anger. "They are in bed with the usurping _p'tok_ who murdered my mother and stole my rightful place on the throne! They claim unexplained planetary phenomena caused the crash of my mother's ship and use the radiation as an excuse to perpetuate their cover-up. When I gain access to my mother's ship, I will be able to prove that the accident was the direct result of sabotage, and expose the council as accessories to the assassination of the rightful matriarch of the Draconian people!"

"Oh, well, I can see how that makes sense," the Doctor said as he subtly positioned himself closer still to the water filtration controls and gently ran his thumb over the on-switch to the sonic screwdriver in his pocket. "Get an investigation going, all well and above board, sounds like a good idea. But you don't need to put all these passengers in danger to do it. Tell you what, call off this hijacking, let the crew take the ship back into the safe zone, and I'll see what I can do to help get your ship back and get your government to convene a proper court to look into the matter." He edged the sonic gently out of his pocket, but the Princess's sharp eyes caught the movement and she immediately pulled a squareness gun out of her robes and pointed it straight at the Doctor, who froze.

"I appreciate the offer, Doctor whoever you are, but I'm not stupid enough to risk trusting an outsider to take care of it. This is a Draconian problem, and it's a Draconian point of honor to settle it ourselves. I and the loyal few who remain to me will handle everything. You will move quietly over to that folding chair in the corner and allow Ch'pok to chain you there, or I will fire a hole through your torso that extends from your knees to your neck. I prefer to accomplish this mission without unnecessary loss of life, but make no mistake. I shall kill you if it helps to bring my mother's killers to justice. Ch'pok."

The Doctor slowly relaxed his hand and took a step back away from the filtration unit as the older of the two male Draconians stepped toward him.

The Princess, meanwhile, turned to the younger of the two without removing her eyes from the Doctor or lowering her gun.

"Aktuh, commence saturation of the crew and passengers."

Aktuh smiled cruelly and reached for the data-pad, which he had already connected to the ship's computer system. "The sprinkler system is now activated, Princess, in every section of the ship besides our own," he announced.

…

In the dining room, Donna made it under the table just as the fire sprinklers went off. Lee was only a second behind her, and barely got hit with a smattering of droplets. Shaun just sat there stupidly in his chair until Donna reached up, grabbed his puffy pirate sleeve, and yanked him down to the floor and under cover with her. The three of them then peered out from under the table at the chaos that had broken out around them.

There were shrieks as well-dressed cruise ship patrons found themselves suddenly drenched by showers of cold, high-pressure water coming out of the emergency sprinkler system. It was only seconds before the confusion and memory loss began to take hold among those who were the wettest.

"What the – where am I? Charles? Charles!"

"Who's Charles? Who're you?"

"Whoa, how did I get here?"

"Eek! Let go of me, you dirty old man!"

A fight broke out between a Gargantuan and a blue humanoid who had forgotten that the war between their races ended in a peace treaty three years earlier. People trying to get away from the fight stampeded to the back of the room, and several tables and chairs were overturned in the process.

Donna, wincing at each crash of expensive dinner china, waved and called for the attention of a steward standing nearby.

"Oi! You in the white! Yes, you!"

With difficulty, the steward pulled his eyes away from the chaos unfolding around him and turned to the woman and two men hiding under the table next to him.

"How do you turn the sprinklers off?" Donna demanded.

"What? How should I know?" he asked, incredulously.

"You work here, you plonker!"

"I-I do?" he stammered. He looked down at his uniform in some surprise.

"Oh, for goodness sake…" Donna huffed and retreated back under the table cloth again.

She noticed Shaun's leg was still sticking out from under the table on the other side, so she grabbed it and hauled it under cover.

"Shaun! You idiot, don't let yourself get wet. Do you feel funny? How's your memory?"

"Uh, fine," he said, shakily. "I didn't get any in my mouth. Is that—"

Another crash punctuated the exchange and Lee put a hand on Donna's shoulder, repositioning himself between her and the shards of porcelain that were flying around with every plate drop outside.

A stun-gun blast tore across the room and hit one of walls on the far side. Passengers and crew renewed their screams.

"Warriors!" shouted the Draconian who had followed Donna into the room. "Warriors, at arms! Rioters have broken into the palace! To me, men!" He leveled the gun at a group of shrieking, panicking former revelers and started shooting indiscriminately. Apparently, he was not immune to the chemical in the water either.

An old man, caught by a blast, fell to the ground next to Donna's knees.

"Oh my god," she cried, reaching into the water spray to grab him and drag him partially inside their makeshift shelter. "He's been hit!"

"No," said Lee, holding her back with a comforting hand on her shoulder. "S-s-s-stunned, only."

"We've got to get out of here!" Donna shouted over the din. She looked over her head at the underside of the table and made a split-second decision. "Grab that end!" She pointed to the table legs behind Lee, and moved over to the legs at the opposite end. Lee obediently moved over, catching her meaning, and took the legs.

"To the corridor, all right? One, two, three, LIFT!" Donna hoisted up the table at one end while Lee shouldered the other, and with Shaun taking the middle between them, the three ran awkwardly through the stunner fire and the pouring water to the corridor, the table acting as a sort of umbrella above them.

Out in the hall, the ceiling was low, and they were able to tilt the table down at Donna's end and up at Lee's to wedge it at about 70 degrees between the floor and ceiling, blocking the water from the sprinkler closest to the dining hall entrance and creating a temporary spray free gap zone about six feet by four feet, out of the immediate line of sight of the Draconian with the stun-gun.

"Now what?" shouted Shaun.

"We've got to shut the water off," Donna yelled back. Backsplash was ricocheting off the wall and onto her hair and clothes, and she tried to huddle closer to the shelter of the angled table.

The water line connecting ceiling sprinklers in the corridor was visibly affixed to the ceiling with metal brackets. Lee looked up and down the line as best he could without getting wet, but couldn't see any kind of closeable valve in the pipe.

The sound of stunner fire in the dining hall lulled for a moment, and Donna stepped away from the table, leaving the other two holding it in place, to peer around the doorframe at the Draconian and people still inside.

Passengers and crew were still climbing the walls, cowering behind overturned tables, or fleeing the room, except for those who had already been knocked out by the stunner. Their bodies were littered around the open floor. The Draconian had paused in his assault and was busy unscrewing something on the stunner. He finished his adjustment and fired at a buffet steward who had taken the opportunity to make a dash for the door. He missed the steward and hit the curtains by the passenger cabin area entrance. The curtains immediately burst into flames.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Donna mumbled to herself. She turned back to the other two in the hall. "I don't think that's a stunner anymore."

…

**Yes, the Draconians swore once in Klingon and have Klingon names. I'm not very creative, guys.**

**And also, yes, the 51****st**** century has interstellar travel, squareness guns, and the Time Agency, but for some reason they're still using water sprinklers for fire control in space… I know. I know. Don't think about it too much. The episode with the **_**Titanic**_** had a spaceship with some kind of flippin' **_**lava pit**_** in it, so I'm just gonna let it go.**


	7. Chapter 6

The Doctor backed away, babbling defensively as Ch'pok advanced on him with a line of rope, all under the cover of the Princess' squareness gun.

"Now look, I know it probably doesn't seem this way, but drugging the entire population of the ship and then dragging them into a quarantined radiation zone known for its unpredictable plasma bursts is not really such a good idea. What if we get hit by plasma, and the shields go down? Well, alright, we'll all probably be vaporized instantly, but what if the shields only start to fail, and you've already neutralized all of the crew? I doubt Tiny here knows how to re-modulate a failing shield. That's an awfully big risk to take."

"I'm afraid you're just going to have to live with that risk, Doctor," she said. "The passengers and crew outnumber us greatly, and I would rather not get into a situation where we are forced to use deadly weapons to proceed with our plan."

"That's all well and good, but I'm afraid that squareness gun isn't exactly built for laser tag."

"I don't want to hurt you, Doctor, but let me be quite clear. I will kill you in a heartbeat if you become too much trouble to deal with. Now quit retreating towards that door and allow yourself to be tied up, or I will end you right here."

"Princess," said Aktuh in a hissed whisper. "I cannot raise K'tal on the comms."

"The old fool probably got himself caught out in the chemical spray," she sneered. "We'll carry on without him."

A low-pitched rumble suddenly vibrated through the ship as if something very huge had hit the shields from outside. The Princess shot her henchmen a sharp look.

"What was that?"

"Looks like we're entering the planet's rings," the Doctor said cheerfully. "The shields are starting to take some direct hits. That grinding noise would be the larger chunks of rocks in the dust burning off when they hit the outer forcefield. The computer will automatically compensate for the increase in radiation and meteoric density by adjusting the shield's harmonic frequency. Speaking of which, you might want to take your biodampers off now, by the way."

"Why?"

"Certain harmonic frequencies don't react well with biodampers. Didn't the vender tell you?"

The princess scoffed at him. "The shield's frequency has no effect on them."

"No, but I've been fiddling with a sonic screwdriver in my pocket this whole time, and I've finally found the frequency that does."

He switched the sonic on and a high pitched whirring noise echoed through the room. The Draconians all yelled and grasped their forearms where their biodamper braces had suddenly sent a mild electric shock through their systems. Rose gasped and swore as the one on her arm did so too, but the Doctor was already changing settings and sonicked the bracer and her handcuffs off in a second and a half flat.

"Sorry about that!" he yelped, ducking a stun-gun blast from Aktuh, who was already disentangling the brace from his arm and advancing on the two escapees. "Best I could come up with in the spur of the moment. Run?"

Throwing off the loosened bonds, Rose grabbed his hand and shoved herself out of the chair. "Run!" she agreed.

The two of them ducked their heads and bolted out of the room under heavy stunner fire.

…

"We've got to turn off the water!" Donna repeated herself, holding up one end of the table as a shield against the sprinkler.

"C-C-Can't," Lee stammered. "No v-valve!"

"Stop it at the source, then!"

Lee looked around desperately, saw a large-sized rubbish bin in the corner, and had an idea.

"One sec'," he said. He grabbed the bin and pulled out the clear plastic liner inside, turned it inside out, dumping rubbish all over the corridor floor, and pulled the bag over himself like a sort of rain poncho. Then he ducked round the table and out into the spray. Donna gaped after him anxiously.

He made his way through the torrents of sprinkler water to a smallish glass window set into the wall with a fire axe behind it – Break Glass In Case Of Emergency.

He smashed the glass and took the axe, then ran over to where the water pipe leading to the dining room crossed the ceiling by the stairs. Raising the axe above his head, he chopped into the water pipe. He was immediately doused by high pressure water pouring out of the pipe and pushing him against the wall, but he somehow kept the bag on over his head, shoulders, and upper torso, and fumbled his way out of the torrent and back down the hall towards the wedged up table.

The flow of water to the sprinklers at the end of the corridor and in the dining hall now interrupted, the spray over Donna's table and the dining hall scaled back to a simple steady drip while the broken pipe by the stairs flooded the aft corridor with litres of water, most of which ran down the stairs in a sort of soggy-carpeted, artificial waterfall. Donna shoved the table off sideways against the wall, and Lee yanked the rubbish bag off his upper body and head, grinning and out of breath.

Donna ran to him.

"Oh, look, you're _soaked_! Your trousers look like you've been wading, AND your sleeves! How's your memory? Do you feel confused? Who am I?" She grabbed his face in both hands and searched his eyes worriedly.

"D, D, D, D, D," he answered, still grinning.

"Good, you're fine, then," she said, releasing him with a sigh of relief.

She turned back to Shaun and the dining hall. Lee peeled off his jacket with the sopping arm and came back with his shirt sleeves pushed up to his elbows to crouch with them in the doorway.

The Draconian was still in the room firing at the walls at random intervals and muttering to himself about defending this station to the end. Most of the conscious passengers had fled away down the halls already, but there were quite a few stunned ones still lying around in the danger zone. Fortunately, everything in the room was now too wet to burn when hit by blaster fire, but it was still leaving disturbing scorch marks wherever it hit, and some of the fallen people looked like they were sporting third-degree burns.

"We have to do something to get those people out of there," Donna whispered.

"Barricade," Lee suggested.

The went back for the table they'd carried into the corridor with them, and, turning it sideways, set it up as a sort of wall sticking halfway into the dining room.

The Draconian fired at them when he saw the movement of the table, but then got distracted by a pile of K'draxian sea sprouts and grumbled something about not defending to the end on an empty stomach. He started eating with one hand, only occasionally waving the gun around to fire with the other at the overturned tables where civilians still cowered and whimpered, cut off from the exits.

Donna crept into the dining room on her hands and knees, staying low behind the cover of the overturned table, peered around the edge at the Draconian's back, and then reached out for a fallen Vinvocci who was lying unconscious a few feet away. She got hold of his pants leg and then pulled him back behind the table as quickly and quietly as she could. Lee was right behind her and helped drag the man to the relative safety of the corridor. They dumped him gently in the corridor on the floor next to Shaun, who drew up his feet in revulsion to avoid touching the strange green cactus man.

Donna turned back to the dining hall, made eye contact with a group of terrified survivors huddling behind the bar, and waved encouragingly.

"We'll see if we can extend the barricade close enough to get those people across," she whispered to Lee.

"Are you crazy!?" hissed Shaun. "You can't go back out there! You'll draw his attention over to us! There's nothin' stopping him from walking over here with his gun and shootin' us all in the face!"

"I'm not leavin' those people in there," Donna snapped back impatiently. "They don't even know what's going on! What chance have they got of getting out on their own?"

Lee moved past her to pick up the table legs of the end sticking farthest into the room. Donna turned back to help him. Shaun lunged for her, grabbing her ankle.

"Wait! Let's go back to the TARDIS! The Doctor will sort things out!"

She ignored him, pulled her ankle away and moved to pick up the near-end table legs. "Ready," she said to Lee. They hoisted the table an inch off the ground and moved it forward a few feet. The Draconian instantly whirled at the sound, sea sprouts sticking out of his mouth, and fired off several scorching blaster shots at them which hit the damp table with a fizzling noise. Donna and Lee dropped it to the floor and hit the deck, covering their heads. The Draconian laughed and swirled a glass of wine before taking a long drink.

"At least toss me the TARDIS key!" Shaun complained from the corridor. "We don't BOTH need to die!"

Donna stretched for another fallen passenger who was now within reach and dragged him back to safety, furious but too pressed for time to argue. She was gonna kill Shaun as soon as this was done. She was getting fed up with his self-centred cowardice and his species-centric bias. She was going to give him a piece of her mind just as soon as the Doctor arrived and got them all out of this mess. In the meantime, she had a job to do.

Shaun sat hunched up as far down the corridor as he could get from the shooting and the limp, stunned cactus mutant freak without getting sprayed by amnesia water. He was trapped, and it wasn't even any of his business! He'd never wanted to be here in the first place. He wished he were on some kind of bender paid for with his newly acquired millions of lotto winnings, rather than on some freakish alien spaceship in the distant future, his only way out dependent on some insane alien "doctor" who was clearly either stupid or suicidal, constantly plunging them into danger and dragging his innocent human victims out with him on these mad missions. This was insanity. The man was dangerous. He was going to get them all killed. Shaun had known that from the first moment he saw him. The freak probably had some kind of mind control, too, the way the others reacted to him. The girls followed him like he was some kind of cult leader. God only knew how Donna had got mixed up in all of this.

He noticed a wine bottle that had fallen off one of the overturned tables and rolled into the corridor, and picked it up, morosely recalling the Donna Noble he'd first met. She had flirted with him rather aggressively and practically forced him to start dating her. When they'd met, she'd been nothing but a silly life-long temp who only ever prattled on about weight loss plans and local scandals and whatever celebrity gossip she'd read in the tabloids that day. He'd felt rather flattered by the way she followed him around, demanding his attention. He'd liked being the center of someone's universe. He'd liked knowing that he was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to a woman. But that woman was not the woman who sat hunched over behind a table some twelve or fifteen feet away from him now, building a barricade against laser blasts while she listened to some dumb, stuttering blighter who couldn't even get a sentence out properly. _His_ Donna never would've reacted like this. _His_ Donna didn't run from vampires with a witty little quip and a laugh like it was all just crazy hilarious fun. And quite frankly, _his_ Donna was not the woman who'd introduced him to an alien and then invited said alien to their wedding a week after that. He hadn't seen _his_ Donna (the _proper_ Donna) since before Christmas. Bitterly, Shaun fumbled with the bottle, got the top off and took another drink.

…

Rose and the Doctor ran hand in hand down a corridor and round a corner into a room full of large-scale pistons that helped power the shield generators. The Doctor slammed a button next to the door once they were through, causing a metal door to slide down from inside the top of the door frame and close the room off from the pursuit behind them.

A metal grating on the floor with steel pipe safety railings sticking up on either side created a walkway down the center of the room designed to prevent workers from wandering off the safe path into a deadly piston and getting snagged and crushed into a pulpy mess. At the far end of the walkway, the floor grating ran through an open door into another room, and the two time travelers sprinted straight down the middle of the room and dove through the door just as the lizard people behind them caught up to the entrance of the piston room. There was a _voop _sound as the princess shot her squareness gun through the door, creating a 4-foot by 4-foot square opening.

On the other side of the open door at the far end of the piston room, Rose and the Doctor found themselves in a big open space dedicated to large crate storage and heavy mid-sized forklifts and machinery for moving said crates on pallets. The floor to ceiling space took up the vertical span of two decks, and the room was about as wide as it was tall. They'd come out about halfway up the wall on a catwalk that circled the interior of the storage hold about 8 or 9 feet above the standard carbon paneling which made up the base flooring, and a set of stairs made of steel grating provided a way down to the bottom of the hold.

Rose and the Doctor ran straight forward into the room and slammed into the catwalk's safety railing at waist height, grabbing hold tightly to prevent their momentum from carrying them over the railing to the floor one deck below. They leaned over the open space below, caught their breaths and looked around for another exit. In the room behind them, the Princess shouted.

"Doctor! You _will _surrender or I will be forced to disintegrate you where you stand!"

The Doctor and Rose glanced behind them through the open door in unison, and then leapt away out of the Draconian's visual range in opposite directions. The Doctor grabbed the catwalk railing and vaulted over it in one smooth leap onto a stack of crates four or five feet below, and leapt down again from there to the bottom level of the storage hold.

Rose dove back against the wall they had just passed through, and flattened herself against it next to the piston room door, hoping to avoid immediate notice by the lizard princess when she stepped through.

The Doctor, suddenly realizing Rose was not right behind him on the floor level of the room, spun round and opened his mouth in dismay. But he had to immediately close it again and dive under the catwalk and behind a stack of crates for cover as the Princess stepped through with the squareness gun and immediately started shooting at him.

As soon as the princess had stepped through, Rose slammed the red button on the door's control panel in the wall next to the door, causing the metal slab to slide down from above and block off the two Draconian henchmen trailing behind in the piston room. In the same movement, she leapt onto the Princess's back from behind and grappled with her for the gun.

The Princess snarled in surprise and anger, and hurled herself backwards against the wall, slamming Rose into the doorframe. Keeping her grip around the Draconian's throat with one elbow, Rose held resolutely onto the wrist of the arm with the gun, and kicked off the wall behind her, throwing the Princess (with Rose still on her back) front-forward against the catwalk safety railing. The Princess had to flail and then grab at the railing with her left hand to prevent them both from toppling over the railing and onto the floor nine feet below.

Alarmed, the Doctor dashed out from the cover of the crates with his arms out to catch Rose if she fell.

Clinging with her knees and one elbow to her piggyback position on the Princess's back, Rose worked both hands up to the Draconian's arm holding the gun, and squeezed the Princess's fingers until the weapon dropped over the rail and clattered to the ground beside the Doctor feet. The Doctor ignored it, still focused anxiously on the wrestling match above his head.

The Princess, still in a choke hold, pushed back from the railing, grabbed Rose's arm with both hands and bit into it with her sharp teeth.

"Agh!" Rose cried out, and released her hold on the Princess. Before the Draconian could recover her balance, however, Rose punched her in the face. All that Torchwood training in Pete's World had left her pretty skilled at this, after all. The Princess recoiled, releasing Rose's bitten arm, and Rose kicked her in the stomach, knocking the Draconian away against the back wall and pushing herself back against the railing in the process. The railing gave way and dumped her backwards off the catwalk, right on top of the Doctor, who was still dancing about below with big worried eyes and his arms out.

Rose landed on top of him, and they both ended up on the floor in a tumble, Rose lying lengthwise across his upper torso in a tangle of arms and legs.

"Ahhh!" Rose shrieked, and broke into a laugh at the same time as she pulled her face up off his chest and pushed her hair out of her eyes. "Thanks for that! Good catch!"

The Doctor winced and disentangled their legs, half sitting up on his elbows. "You nearly gave me a heart attack!" he complained a little breathlessly. "Two heart attacks!"

"Aw," Rose smiled and kissed him cheekily on the mouth, still lying on top of him. "Poor baby."

He glared at her as best he could without actually moving her off him and getting up from the floor. "Don't do things like that. Imagine how I'd feel if you got shot and killed? You're still human! You can only heal from so much!"

Rose laughed teasingly at him with her tongue pressed against her teeth. "You know, that warning loses something coming from someone who's regenerated three times in the few short years I've known him."

"_Almost_ regenerated," he grumbled. "I only completed the process once."

"Still counts," she argued.

Above them, the Princess staggered to her feet and hit the door control button, letting her henchmen into the room.

"Bloody hell, back-up's arrived," Rose groaned, rolling off him.

"Time for another dramatic escape," the Doctor agreed, and picked himself up hurriedly off the floor, sweeping the squareness gun up with him in the same movement.

Grabbing Rose's hand with his left and aiming the squareness gun with his right, the Doctor dashed through the renewed stunner fire and shot a square hole in the wall ahead of them just in time for him and Rose to leap through into the next room, part of the propulsion section.

"Good one," Rose panted as they ran, grinning ear to ear, straight across to the other side.

"Well, it worked last time," the Doctor agreed, matching her smile of exhilaration.

"You mean the hospital in the Blitz? Ah, good old Jack and the weapons of Villengard!" She shot him another tongue-in-teeth smile and bumped his shoulder with hers without missing a step. "Brings back memories!"

They shot another hole in the wall ahead of them without breaking their pace and leapt through again, cutting a straight line across compartments, but this time when they burst out of their improvised doorway, they were met with a shocking faceful of cold water.

Both of them gasped and squeaked as they were immediately drenched by the still-active sprinklers, and they stumbled to a halt, mouths open, wet hair plastered to their faces and dripping down their foreheads, temples, and necks in small torrents.

"Oh! Oh my god!" Rose sputtered, backing up automatically from the sudden chill. "What the hell?!"

"Damn, forgot about the sprinklers," the Doctor said, shaking his head and wiping his face ineffectively with his soaking wet sleeve to try to get the water out of his eyes.

"What the hell is going on? Why am I standing in a sprinkler in my clothes?"

The Doctor glanced behind them through the open hole in the wall and saw the Draconians climbing clumsily through the squareness hole before that.

"Rose, come on," he grabbed her shoulders and half-pushed, half-guided her away from the opening to hide behind a large vat of hydrogen fuel that was connected to the still-damaged maneuvering thrusters on the hull just beyond the outer wall. He knew where they were now. This was the propulsion section, and messing about in here with the squareness gun would be very not-good. The sprinklers were dumping buckets of water everywhere, and puddles had built up around some very sensitive equipment connected to massive canisters of gas and other components of rocket fuel, all interconnected by pipes the diameter of a Judoon's spacesuit collar and only half as easy to fracture. This was not the place for a blaster fight.

"Where am I?" Rose asked, not keeping nearly quiet enough for a person in hiding. "How did I get here? And who are you?"

The Doctor turned away from his intense focus on the squareness door to look at her in sudden alarm. "What do you mean, who am I?"

"I mean, who are you? And what are we doing behind this… whatever it is, with all these sprinklers going off?"

Horrified, the Doctor stuck out his tongue and licked a trickling stream of water that was dribbling down from his temple and analyzed the chemical ingredients. Realizing what was in it, he grabbed Rose by the shoulders.

"Rose! What's the last thing you remember?" he asked urgently.

"Wha'? I dunno… why? Why is my head so fuzzy?"

"Oh blimey, this is not good," he breathed out.

"Wow… Listen, mate," she said, started to sound more relaxed and a little giggly, "I think I've had a few too many, actually. Look, have you seen Shareen? I think I need to head home."

Around the other side of the chemical tank, a reptilian head poked out just enough to get a lay of the land without getting wet.

"Damn," the Princess said. "Ch'pok! Aktuh! Turn those blasted sprinklers off and get me the other squareness gun!"

"Bugger," said the Doctor, taking Rose's hand and pulling her along deeper into the machinery after him. "Yes, you know what, I have seen Shareen, I think she was over this way, in fact. Let's go find her, and keep our heads down as we go."

"Oi!" Rose protested, as she was dragged along. "Watch it, mate!"

The sprinklers were finally shut off, much to the Doctor's relief, and the voices of the Draconians grew louder as they re-approached the hole in the wall. The Doctor pulled up behind a set of chemical mixing chambers and ducked down, pulling a perplexed Rose down next to him.

"They're coming, shh!" he warned.

"Don't shush me," Rose glared, yanking her hand back from his and rubbing it. "Who's coming? And what the hell is going on? What is this place?"

A stunner blast hit the wall above them, just over their heads, and Rose dropped to the floor and gaped at it. "Wha'?! What was that?!"

"Run!" the Doctor said, and grabbed her hand. The two of them bolted from the chemical mixing chambers to a sturdier, less chemically volatile computer bank where they could duck for cover.

"Oh, my god!" Rose shouted as they ran. "Why are they shooting at us?!"

The Draconians marched closer as they ran, firing shot after shot at them from the stun-guns. Rose dove behind the terminal with the Doctor, barely missing a stunner blast to the leg.

The Princess, having already acquired a second squareness gun from some hidden stash back in the water filtration room, now retrieved the first one from the floor where the Doctor had dropped it and passed it over to Ch'pok.

"Oh, Doctor," the Draconian crooned. "Why don't you quit playing games and come out? There's no escape for you from here."

Rose was peering around the base of the computer bank with shock and disbelief written all over her face.

"Oh my god," she whispered furiously. "They're lizard people!"

"Yeah," the Doctor breathed out mildly, looking stressed. This wasn't a good room for a firefight. They were right next to the outer hull, and too many of the canisters in here contained explosive gas. This was really not good.

"What do they want?" asked Rose, sensible as usual but decidedly behind the rest of the class at the moment.

"Oh, to kill us, mostly," the Doctor answered with a sigh.

"Why? What did we do?"

"Eh…"

He stuck his head up from behind the computer bank to attempt a little negotiation.

"Listen–AUGH!" As soon as he was visible, Ch'pok nearly took his skull off with a squareness gun blast, and he had to duck down again. Stunner blast filled the air above them in a torrent of noise and sparks, bouncing heatedly off the massive thruster fuel tank beyond. The thick steel beam behind them _had _been acting as a barrier between the gunfire and the volatile fuel tank, but the squareness gun had taken care of that.

"I wouldn't keep shooting if I were you," the Doctor called to the Princess from behind the console.

"The coward's way is never to fight," the Princess sneered back.

Another blast hit the tank behind them, and there was a clinking noise followed by a hiss. The Doctor blanched, his freckles standing out sharply against his skin.

"Rose, grab hold of this bar, quick!" He wrapped her hands around a railing that stuck up from the floor, then grabbed it himself with one hand and wrapped the other around her waist. "Don't let go!"

Ch'pok fired again with the squareness gun, aiming at the computer console, but missed and grazed the side of the tank before hitting the inner wall connected to the outside hull.

Two things happened at once. The tank exploded, blowing superheated gas and large twisted chunks of metal over half of the room, and the outer hull buckled and tore, explosively depressurizing the room and sucking that same heated gas out into the vacuum of space. There was a loud rush of air and metal debris hitting the edges of the newly gaping hole in the outer wall, followed by an eerie silence as the air grew too thin to carry sound vibrations.

Rose and the Doctor held on for dear life as Ch'pok flew past them, bounced off the broken tank with a horrified expression, and shot out into space where he promptly froze and died. Aktuh and the Princess held on desperately to the computer console and a metal chemical canister that was bolted to the floor.

Then one of the ship's renowned safety features kicked in and a forcefield triggered by the depressurization sensors automatically flickered over the gap, closing off the vacuum and allowing the life support system to pump air back into the room at the safest speed possible.

The Doctor, gifted as he was with a respiratory bypass system, was up on his feet the instant the forcefield was secure, running over to the Draconians to yank the remaining weapons out of their weakened grasps and drag them over to a steel support beam.

Rose's vision had temporarily blacked out as a result of oxygen loss, but she hadn't quite passed out and was able to get up again after only a few seconds with nothing more than the beginnings of a massive headache and a little dizziness to show for it. She stumbled to her feet in time to see the Doctor using duct tape to secure the captured Draconians to the support beam. Baffled but no longer in any apparent immediate danger, she turned around to stare at the big gaping hole in the hull, a massive gash that comprised most of the side of the room and part of the ceiling and the room above them as well. The hole was completely covered by the transparent force field, giving a perfect, unobstructed view directly out into the vastness of space.

A million tiny filaments in the walls started to produce a yellow-white foam at the edges of the tear, foam that solidified slowly into a waxy substance that layered onto itself and started to gradually grow inward at a snail's pace like a scab growing over a bleeding wound, one inch at a time.

The Doctor finished his trussing and came over to stand next to the awestruck pink and yellow human staring out into the unfiltered stars.

"We're in space!" she exclaimed quietly before he could ask if she was alright.

"Yeah," he said, sounding amused and a little tired.

"I can't believe it! That's amazing!" She turned to him, joy and bewilderment lighting up her face in equal portions. "What did I have to drink last night?" she laughed. "And how did I get out here? Who _are _you?"

The Doctor took a breath and put his hands on both her shoulders. "I'm the Doctor, you're Rose Tyler, and we travel together in time and space on a ship called the TARDIS."

Rose met his earnest gaze with a half smile, waiting a beat to see if he was joking. He didn't flinch.

"…No way," she said after a minute, staring at him.

"Yes way."

Her gaze shifted searchingly between his eyes, and whatever she saw there, she must have liked because a moment later she smiled with that same look of intrigue and excitement that had originally won his hearts. "And, and this – this is the TARDIS, is it?" she asked, biting her lip coyly.

"Nope, 'fraid not," he replied. "This is just an interstellar luxury cruise ship we happened to land on in the Ariadne planetary system. It's called the _Hindenburg._"

"_The Hindenburg? _Oh, that's comforting," Rose joked.

A smile cracked his solemn face and he smiled at her. "Rose Tyler, that is exactly what you said to me this afternoon!"

"Why can't I remember?"

"Lethe Mnemosynate. It's a chemical compound in the sprinkler water. Blocks memories, but doesn't erase them. The amount you remember depends on the amount of the chemical you ingest. We'll get you an antidote, though, fix you right up."

She nodded, laughed nervously again, and rubbed her hands over her arms, shivering. "I feel all tingly!"

"That's the adrenaline," he explained.

"I think I like the adrenaline."

They grinned at each other. He was holding eye contact in a way that made her feel all warm and which agreed very well with the adrenaline pumping through her veins.

They both leaned forward spontaneously, he looked like he was going to kiss her, and then Rose hesitated and pulled back a little. She bit her lip. The Doctor also paused and raised his eyebrows.

"Um, I… Sorry, I just, er, kind of have a boyfriend."

The smile returned to his face, this time sort of mischievous. "Yeah, you do," he said, without missing a beat. "And his name's not Mickey Smith."

Rose stared at him in renewed shock, and then started to really laugh. He reached out, took her hand, and threaded her fingers through his own. She smiled down at their joined hands, and then turned to look back out through the huge gash in the wall at the stars and empty void, releasing some of the tension.

"Wow, so… we're really in space. I haven't been in space before. Or have I?"

"You have, actually," he said, eyes still on her. "You'll remember soon enough. And besides, the Earth's in space. You were born in space."

"Yeah, but that doesn't count. Hey, isn't that weird? What is that?" she pointed. "It says 'police box' on it."

Smile suddenly gone, the Doctor whipped around to stare horrified out the open hole at the TARDIS drifting slowly away off into the distance with a bunch of other debris from the explosion. Storage C must have been the room above them, right on top of the gas canister.

"Not very Spock, is it?" Rose said, and laughed.


	8. Chapter 7

Donna and Lee got the passengers from behind the bar out of the room and safely into the passenger cabin corridor. The sprinklers all around the ship had miraculously stopped spewing water, so it was finally possible to run and take refuge in the cabins.

The Draconian in the room, however, now had a hostage – one of the confused crewmen who had swallowed buckets of the stuff earlier and was now disoriented and groggy.

Donna stood from the makeshift barricade and held her hands up non-threateningly.

"Listen, you don't want to shoot him," she said, stepping carefully around several broken bits of dishes on the floor. "He's harmless. In fact, you've won now, so why don't you put the gun down and let him go, okay, lizard man?"

She slowly approached the alien, trying to speak soothingly. "I know you're confused," she began.

"I am not confused," the Draconian said, affronted. "I- I know everything that's going on. This is an attempted coup. I don't know what you outsiders are doing mixed up in it, but rest assured, justice will be swift." He pulled up his gun to point it at her, and she froze. "Tell me what Draconian you work for, or be executed on the spot."

Behind her, Lee shot up from the barricade in alarm and protest. "No!"

The Draconian turned the gun at Lee and shot him. The human stumbled backwards at the impact and hit the floor.

"Lee!" Donna shouted, then turned in outrage, stepped forward and smacked the gun out of the Draconian's hands. "Oh, I've had it with you!" she fumed. While he stared at her in shock, she picked up a full bottle of champagne from the deck and clobbered him in the head. The Draconian fell in a heap, and Donna leapt back over the debris in the room to check on Lee.

He was on his back on the floor, curling up with his hand over the right side of his chest in pain, but looked otherwise all right.

"Are you hurt?" Donna asked, kneeling next to him and prying his hand off the wound to check.

"Uh, yeah," he answered. He winced as she popped the top buttons on his shirt and pulled it open to take a look.

There was a nasty burn mark on his chest and the fabric hit by the upgraded stun-gun had melted, getting plastered to the burn in a red and white mess that smelled like chemical fiber smoke and human barbecue.

"Ugh, you're gonna need a doctor for that," Donna grimaced. "Or at least a once-over with a sonic screwdriver. Could be worse, though. Bet you won't even have a scar!" she said brightly, trying to cheer him up.

Lee, still in no small amount of pain, gave her a half-smile.

"Donna, give me the TARDIS key," said Shaun abruptly from the corridor. He'd run and hid once the hostage situation began, but now he was back. Apparently he hadn't gone far.

Donna narrowed her eyes and turned to look at him from the floor next to Lee.

"Why, so you can go and hide some more? Where the hell were you?"

"I was running for my life, which is what _you_ should've been doing, too!"

"People were TRAPPED!" Donna over-enunciated like he was too stupid to understand otherwise. "They're all doped up on sprinkler water, and half of 'em don't even know their own _names_ anymore! What was I supposed to do, just leave 'em?"

Shaun gave a little incredulous, exasperated laugh and threw up his arms. "Yes! YES! Saving people's not your job! You're a _temp_, Donna! You're a human!An' you're married to _me! _Is it so much to ask that you think about _my _safety a little for a change!? I'm only your bloody _husband_!"

Donna sneered at him. "I think you've been thinkin' of your safety enough for the both of us, _sweetheart_."

"Well, it's not like I've got a choice, have I? Someone's got to think of it! An' apparently I'm the only one who _does _think about safety! You know, I think you care more about that bloody alien Doctor, or this old _pal _of yours here, than you do about me!"

"Oh, don't be stupid!"

"Am I, though? _Am _I being stupid? 'Cos you've changed, Donna! Ever since that bloody Doctor showed up, you've been putting on airs! Trying to be all high and mighty, trying to fit in with this lot, these, these _aliens_ and _people from the future _and other nonsense. 'Oh, me, I know all about these alien celebrities,'" he mocked, putting on a falsetto. "'Oh, of course I know how to use psychic paper! Oh, here's a random bloke from the 51st century, of course I know him, too!' Look at you, hanging all over him like you're best mates. I bet he doesn't know you from a walrus! You didn't even know if you had his name right when you scampered off after him like a puppy!"

"Of course I knew his bloody name!" Donna shouted. Shaun ignored her, on a roll.

"Do you even know this bint, mate?" he asked Lee sarcastically. "She something special? Queen of time and space, an' all? Didn't even know his job, did you, Donna? Well, can't blame you – the rate he gets words out, you ask a question, you'd be waiting til bloody Christmas for a proper answer. But oh, you're friends, aren't you? Met at a, what was it, a library, you said? What'd you do, follow him around like you did me? Bring him _coffee_? Pester him at his job where he couldn't get away, an' had to be polite? Did you share a special moment over a gossip rag once?"

Donna had had enough. She hauled herself to her feet and took a step toward him ominously. "We had kids together, alright?!" she spat out, practically breathing fire. "We were married!"

Shaun paused, caught off-guard. His expression changed from one of nasty mockery to confusion, then indignation. "What do you mean, _married_? No, hold on, what do you mean, _kids?!_"

Donna opened her mouth to snap some retort, then caught a glimpse of Lee lying propped up against the wall by her feet, staring at her like the breath had just been ripped from his lungs and she was standing there with his heart in her hands. She faltered.

"They weren't… proper kids, that is…" she backtracked, gaze torn between the angry tosser on her right and the injured bloke with the gleaming eyes at her feet. "I mean, they weren't real. 'S just… Oh, sod it." She focused on Shaun. "I told you I'd had bad luck with marriages. The first time I got married, I almost got fed to a giant spider, and then the second time, I really _thought_ I was married only to find out it was all some kind of false reality, and a computer was messing with our heads. It wasn't real. The kids weren't real."

Shaun relaxed, crossed his arms, and sneered at her. "Oh, well that makes _perfect _sense. They weren't _real. _Well, I guess that explains that. And here I thought old Wilf was the nutty one," he scoffed.

Donna felt that burning anger flare up again. "Oi! Don't you sneer at me!" She stabbed a finger threateningly in his direction. "Don't you _dare! _You wouldn't know a thing about it! You wouldn't know virtual reality if it _bit you in the arse_! They _felt _bloody real!" she ended defensively, shocked to hear the rawness building in her voice. She glared down at the overturned tables to hide the fact that her vision was definitely NOT going swimmy suddenly. "They _felt _real," she muttered again.

From below, a hand reached up and took hers. She looked down at Lee in surprise.

"Ella and Josh," he said softly, clearly. "Never forgot."

Donna stared down at him incredulously through blurry eyes. So she wasn't the only one who had mourned them.

His gaze held hers, and as he looked at her, she started to wonder if maybe she hadn't been the only one left mourning a marriage, too. In fact, the more she looked at him, the more she suspected he might have been a little messed up by the whole affair. Maybe she'd got it all wrong. He didn't look like he thought it was computer brainwashing. He looked like he'd just found the love of his life again after two years of separation.

For the first time, it consciously occurred to Donna that she might have made a big mistake in marrying Shaun.

There was a huge crash and a rumble that Donna could feel through the floor, and the windows lit up with a flash like a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere outside. The rumble faded, and in the sudden shocked silence that followed, they could hear an alarm going off somewhere in the depths of the employee only areas.

"What was that?" Donna asked in a hushed voice.

"P-p-plasma wave?" guessed Lee. That didn't sound good.

…

The Doctor and Rose ran through the corridors and up the stairs, collecting the crew members least affected by the Lethe Mnemosynate along the way. Once they had a decent number of crew persons who at least KNEW they were crew persons, they were able to send some of them back to pick up the duct-taped Draconians in the propulsion section and the others to round up all the passengers and other crew they could find and collect everyone in the dining hall.

The Doctor rushed into the hall towing a grinning, awestruck Rose by the hand and greeted Donna without breaking stride on the way to the employee-only computer terminal in the lectern on the dais.

"Hello, Donna, good to see you looking relatively dry. Watch Rose, will you?" he said, releasing Rose's hand and bounding up to the platform.

Donna opened her mouth in confusion but he was already at the computer typing out incomprehensible nonsense. She turned back to Rose, who had come to a standstill in the middle of the room and was staring with great interest and enthusiasm at the aliens and half-human hybrids trickling into the room after them.

Rose noticed Donna watching her and turned with a smile. "Aliens are real. This is _so_ brilliant."

"And yoouuu're soaked," Donna noted dryly. "Well, isn't that _wizard._"

"Do I know you?" Rose asked curiously.

There was another bright flash outside, this time accompanied by a buzzing, crackling sound from all the electronics in the room.

"What was that!?" Shaun cried.

"That'd be the plasma bursts starting to hit us," was the Doctor's brisk, cheerful answer.

"It didn't feel so bad this time," Donna observed, making an effort to be positive. "Last time, I could feel the whole ship shake."

"Ah, that would've been the explosion in propulsion section. Blew out part of the hull. Decompressed the entire compartment. That's fine now."

"What!?"

They were interrupted by a group of four crewmen who came in carrying two duct-taped lizard people between them, whom they set on the floor by the dais.

"Thank you, boys. If you could just add that third one to the lot?" The Doctor pointed at the Draconian Donna had knocked out. "Excellent."

The Doctor continued his mysterious business at the computer terminal, frowning in concentration. After another moment or two of typing busily, he looked up at Donna and the crewmen who had gathered round him as their new defacto leader of sorts.

"Well, I just ran some scans. Propulsion and steering are both completely fried from the blast damage, and while the ship's defenses are doing their job remarkably well – Shields holding steady even despite the plasma blasts! Impressive design, that! – our trajectory's been altered and we're heading into the planet with no way to stop it. We've got thrusters that'll allow us to do some very nice barrel rolls, but other than that, we're completely at the mercy of gravity for the time being."

Another rumble and flash ran through the ship. The growing crowd made little alarmed noises and clustered together in the middle of the hall.

"And again!" the Doctor chirped, waltzing back down the podium to join his friends on the floor. "This is going to get worse before it gets better. Well, until we make it better. Well, until we get off the ship. Or implode. We'll definitely eventually implode. These atmospheric gasses are just going to get denser the deeper we get."

Donna stared at him in dismay. "Can't we get everyone onto the TARDIS?"

The Doctor awkwardly scratched the back of his neck. "Yeahhhh there's a small problem with that. Take a look outside." He jerked his head towards the glass on the starboard side.

Donna and Shaun both followed his gesture with their eyes to the big scenic ballroom windows facing out away from the planet-side and into space, and were horrified to see a big blue box drifting around freely in the distance.

The ship listed sideways in a sudden uncontrolled descent toward the planet.

"Annnnd atmospheric entry has started!" the Doctor said, bouncing back up to the computer at the lectern. "I've got a plan! Don't panic! There's still a chance we can break free of the planet's gravity, just a _chance!_ I'm going to put the ship into a spinning barrel roll, draw the remaining power from the ship's engines and integrate it with the lifepod ejection burners – burners? Pushers? Explosive thrusters? Ah, explosive thrusters. Very dangerous. Then I'm going to jettison the lifepods from the planet-side of the ship to add a little more velocity away from the planet, roll, and jettison the other side, and hopefully that will give us JUST enough momentum to break orbit."

He pulled out the sonic, turned it on and started whirling through the ship's automated safety protocols, dismantling and reinforcing them where necessary at breakneck speed, all the while rattling off explanations to the people around him.

"Right! So! There are only six lifepods, and they're quite huge. Not pods at all, really, more like life boats, or maybe life schooners, built to hold roughly 100 people each. Mass like that, the explosive thrusters are designed to give a pretty nice shove off the ship in the event of a disaster. Set them off in unison, one side at a time, and we should get a decent push away from the planet, might get us back into a somewhat stable orbit long enough for a rescue to reach us."

"Whoa, hold on a second!" Shaun protested. "You wanna jettison the lifepods?! That's suicide! How are we gonna get off the ship if it doesn't work? Why not just get _into_ the lifepods and abandon ship?"

The Doctor waved the idea off impatiently. "We can't. The second round of lifepods would never make it out of orbit once we release the first. We've got at least 600 people on board. At most, half of these people could be saved in the three starboard pods, and the other half would die in the port pods, pushed too deep into the gas giant by the reactionary thrust from the first sendoff to escape the planet's gravity."

"But half of us could live!" Shaun insisted shrilly. "Better than _everyone_ dying if your jettison plan doesn't work!"

The Doctor put the sonic down, leaned across the table at Shaun and pointed at the small group of people settling chairs around the tied up Draconians.

"Look, Temple, I do not have time to argue about this," he said through his teeth. "If you're not going to help, go over there and _sit quietly._"

Offended, Shaun looked around, but no one seemed inclined to back him up. Instead, they all just looked at the Doctor in terror and hope. Grumbling about cult leaders and being outnumbered, Shaun stumped over to the corner and plopped down sulkily in a seat.

"Donna!" the Doctor said, immediately switching back to the issue at hand, "I need you to get anyone wearing a medical staff uniform together and lead them to the infirmary. Collect all the Pentasodium Caesofine you can find, dilute it to a one-fifth solution in Tetracycline, and start passing it out to anyone who got soaked in the dining hall, most confused first. That'll relieve the symptoms from the sprinkler water."

Donna nodded and hurried away.

"Captain Manning!" the Doctor continued without a pause for breath. "I need everyone-and-I-do-mean-_everyone_ on board gathered in this room for emergency procedures. I'm going to cut power to the rest of the ship in order to boost the remaining maneuvering thrusters to give us that extra bit of lift. The decks connected to the gaping hole in the hull around the propulsion deck will decompress again once the emergency forcefield is taken offline, so we can't leave any stragglers behind. Also, I need someone in the bridge to transfer all primary system controls here to this station. This is our new point of operations. Anyone else who's feeling relatively coherent, go with the captain and help with the search for hiding passengers and crew."

The crew did as they were told, and Donna came back with a group of people holding medicine bottles and makeshift solution jars. She started passing them out to eager hands, and once her arms were empty, she came back to stand in front of the lectern where the Doctor was busy on the computer terminal.

"Those most affected by the drug will get groggy as the antidote takes effect," he said to her without looking up from his work. "You'll need to clear some floor space for some of them to lie down."

"Yeah. Rose has just taken some and is making room now. Er, Doctor," she added and paused.

He glanced up to see her standing in front of the dais with concern on her face and a ruggedly handsome, totally unfamiliar bloke practically glued to her sleeve. He raised an eyebrow in query.

"This is Lee, Lee McAvoy," she said, jerking a thumb in the quiet chap's direction. "From the _Library_."

The Doctor raised both eyebrows almost to his hairline. "_Oh._"

Donna blinked and frowned at him. The Doctor waited expectantly.

"He can _help,_" she added for clarity – unnecessarily, she thought. "He hasn't got any of that amnesia stuff on 'im."

Eyebrows still raised, the Doctor tilted his head toward Lee. "Er, good! Right, then. Yes. Get the unconscious and injured squared away over there. The amnesiacs who are still waiting for their turn with the antidote can help clear space in the meantime. There's some heavy lifting they'll need help with."

Lee nodded briskly and headed for the area in question. Donna narrowed her eyes at the Doctor and didn't follow. Instead, she settled into a glare with her arms crossed and her lips pursed.

Not wanting any of whatever _that _was about, the Doctor turned back to his work and made a great show of being really, really busy doing really, really important things. Donna wasn't fooled and marched up the stairs onto the stage next to him to give him a piece of her mind.

"All right, I saw that. What was with that '_oh_' back there?"

"What '_oh_'?" the Doctor asked, still working furiously on two additional terminals that had just been opened up to him from the bridge.

Donna pursed her lips and cocked her head to one side. "_I_ said 'This is Lee from the library,' and you said '_oh_.'"

"You gave me a fact. I acknowledged it. That's a very normal thing to do!"

"It wasn't that kind of '_oh_'! It was an 'I found something juicy to gossip about later' kind of '_oh_'."

The Doctor looked round from his work, face scrunched up in utter bafflement. "_Something juicy—?_ Donna, I'm the lord of space and time, the last of a race of near-immortal hyper-advanced aliens that held the fate of the universe itself in their hands and played with history like it was a toy. You think I'm going to care whether you carry a torch around for your old brainwashed-by-a-supercomputer fake husband?"

Donna's eyes widened, suspicions confirmed. "Oi!" she huffed, affronted. "I'm not carrying a torch! How can you even think something like that? You were at _my wedding!_"

"_I don't think anything!_" the Doctor protested helplessly. "Honestly, Donna, we're falling into the atmosphere of a radioactive gas giant which is shooting plasma bursts at us and will implode the ship in about fifteen minutes if we don't do something about the pressure on the outer hull, and _do you really think this is the time?_"

Plasma hit the ship again and the shield alarms went off, flashing mauve lights and a high pitched alarm throughout the common space. The Doctor flew back to the console, running his fingers all over computer terminal, as the crew jogged back in from other places on ship, congregating the last of the lost people on this deck.

"I'm on it!" Doctor shouted. "Captain, get that alarm off. I'm boosting the shielding. I can configure a re-modulated beta wave to protect against the plasma bursts, but it'll only hold for one, maybe two more hits before it's useless again. The radiation signature in the nearby atmosphere changes right before a burst—"

"By a f-factor of XATM-092," finished Lee, hurrying back over from the makeshift med zone.

The Doctor glanced over at him, surprised. "That's right."

Lee nodded. "I'm a r-r-researcher. Exotic radiation. Been studying the p-p-plasma bursts. We've got a p, p, p, p, p…" He closed his eyes in frustration. "A p-p-probe on board, shielding automatically re-modulates every time we r-r-register the signature change. It's d-designed for this planet."

The Doctor stared at him intently. "Can you jerry-rig the probe's shield modulation metrics to feed directly into the ship's primary systems?"

"S-sure."

"Good man. Get up here." The Doctor bounded off the platform with the employee computer terminals and ran over to the public access ones while Lee climbed up to take his place. "I'm going to reconfigure the lifepods, drain all resources and fuel from the remaining maneuvering thrusters and transfer it to the pods to up their power output. With enough luck, they'll give us just enough force to propel us back up into a semi-permanent orbit and not blow us up in the process."


	9. Chapter 8

Shaun sat in a chair next to the tied up Draconians and sulked. Everyone was ignoring him. That stupid Doctor was about to blow away their last chance at getting off the ship before they were all killed, and the others were _letting _him. Not just letting him, _helping _him. It was insanity.

He was startled when one of the lizard people, the young one with the goatee, whispered to him suddenly.

"You seem troubled, human."

Shaun narrowed his eyes at the alien with barely repressed distaste. "I'm sitting next to you lot, why wouldn't I be?" he sneered.

"My feeling is the same for you. So much _pink skin. _Scale-lessness. Soft weakness."

"Look, d'you mind? I'm trying to have a moment here."

"Your troubles go further than that. You do not agree with this one who calls himself 'Doctor.'" The Draconian's mouth curved up at the corners in a knowing smile.

"He wants to get us all killed," Shaun vented, gesturing with both hands in exasperation. "He's gonna eject the lifepods! The ship's goin' down, and he wants to eject the bleedin' lifepods! He's insane!"

The Draconian hissed softly, contemplatively. "He does not have your best interests in mind. He is not human."

Shaun scoffed. "Yeah, well, neither are you."

"I, however, am a proud Draconian. An honest enemy, one who does not use _tricks _and _disguises _to deceive."

"I guess that makes us besties, now, does it? Why are you so talkative all of a sudden?"

The prisoner leaned closer to Shaun and lowered his voice even further. "I also do not wish to die on this ship. Let us take a lifepod and leave while we still can."

Shaun stared at him, brow furrowed. "_What?_"

"I cannot free myself from these bindings. You cannot separate the lifepod from the primary system override and initiate the launch sequence yourself. Let two enemies become allies for a short while, as it serves both our interests."

Shaun laughed darkly. "You want _me_ to trust _you_?"

The Draconian held his steady gaze, unfazed by the laughter. "It is better to face an open enemy, one whose intent is clear to you, than to face a hidden one whose intentions are opaque, is it not?"

The grin faded from Shaun's face as he considered what was said.

The Draconian smiled again. "You need not even unbind my hands. Move me to the pod and I will tell you what to do."

…

The Doctor knelt by Rose and checked her pulse. She was sleeping soundly on the floor in a row with twenty other fully unconscious patients. There was a smattering of other sleepers among the large group of those resting after being given the amnesia antidote, but most of the formerly-confused crowd were still able to putter around and mumble to each other in a fatigued but technically awake sort of way.

Donna came up behind the Doctor and put a gentle hand on his arm. "How is she?"

He drew back from Rose's wrist and sat on the floor. "Oh, she'll be fine. She's sleeping it off. Give her an hour, and she should be right as rain again."

Donna smiled. "Good. The captain has a report."

Captain Manning was just finishing a systems check on the computer when the Doctor came up to him. The captain stood to attention.

"Doctor! All resources have been rerouted to the lifepods, and the thrusters have been charged as ordered. Cromwell reports all passengers and crew are on deck and accounted for."

"Brilliant!" the Doctor replied, taking his place at the controls. "No time to waste! Tell everyone to hold on. There's gonna be a pretty powerful—"

Before he could finish the sentence, there was a loud roaring sound, and a tremor ran through the entire ship. One of the six green squares on the computer display turned red.

"Blimey," Donna said, one hand braced against the lectern for balance. "Well, that wasn't so bad."

"That… wasn't me," the Doctor frowned anxiously.

"How d'you mean, it wasn't you? That wasn't the lifepods going off?"

"That was _a _lifepod going off," the Doctor replied in growing alarm. "And on the wrong side of the ship! We've lost one lifepod, and it launched _away_ from the planet, pushing us deeper in!"

"What happened?" Captain Manning exclaimed, frantically running through multiple open systems datafeeds on the terminal next to him.

"Someone ejected a lifepod early. They used all the power on that side of the ship to boost their launch. Two lifesigns on board. Only two people, trading away the safety of all the rest! No one else will be able to make orbit, now – We're too deep!"

Donna opened and closed her mouth, looking hopelessly around the room, somehow already knowing who she _wouldn't _see. "…Where's Shaun?"

The Doctor gave her a sidelong glance while still working on the terminal, and didn't say anything. There wasn't much to say. He was vexed, of course, and disappointed, but not particularly surprised. But it had to be far worse for Donna. He watched the realization wash over her, followed by denial and then self-doubt. He looked away back at his work. He had people to save. He couldn't afford to be distracted now. Donna was strong; she would manage.

"I don't see Shaun," she repeated more insistently. No one responded or made eye contact. "Has anyone seen Shaun?!"

"Sorry, ma'am," said a sheepish crewman who'd been hanging about silently in the background. "I saw Mr. Temple drag one of the prisoners off in the direction of the lifepods, and didn't stop him." He turned to the Doctor. "He'd said _you_ said to jettison the 'trash' along with the lifepods, a sort of… execution in space."

The Doctor looked at him in disgust. "I wouldn't do that."

"No, sir. I thought… I thought it was a scare tactic to make them talk."

The Doctor shook his head in frustration. "Captain, reroute all power away from the remaining lifepods and into the shields. We're going to need that extra boost in a minute. And get me a pile going of all the small-scale, portable technical equipment on the ship. If I've got to macgyver something, I'm going to need to know what materials I've got to work with."

"Yes, sir!" The captain rushed away to another control panel.

Donna stared straight ahead, mind blank.

"The ejected lifepod has safely reached outer orbit," a crewman at a datastream station informed Donna sympathetically.

She just stared straight ahead for another minute before realizing that that last update had been aimed at her. "Oh. Yeah, thanks," she said numbly. She went to sit down out of the way.


	10. Chapter 9

The Doctor raced around the dining hall, weaving in and out of the crowd of passengers and crew, checking the different readings they'd set up to display on each computer terminal. Plasma bursts crackled around the outside of the ship with increasing frequency as they continued to descend deeper and deeper into the atmosphere. The Doctor's mouth was running a mile a minute.

"All right, everyone, taking stock! I'm gonna run through the situation point by point and we'll consider ideas. One! The _Hindenburg_ is falling into K'ribb-dees and the engines are shot. The ship will continue to sink in the atmosphere until the pressure becomes too great and it implodes. We can't fight the pressure and we can't stop the sinking of the ship, so logically, our only hope now is to evacuate everyone. There are five escape pods left, but thanks to our not-so-charming lifepod-stealing friends, they haven't got enough power left to achieve escape velocity."

Lee, who had stayed at the improvised shield station after hooking the probe's shield modulator up to the computer, raised a hand.

"Erm, there's more p-p-plasma," he pointed out with some alarm.

"Right!" The Doctor clapped his hands. "The exotic radiation unique to this planet is ionizing the gas pockets in the atmosphere at an increasing rate and for whatever reason, the resulting plasma bursts seem to be centered around us. That brings us to Point Two. Why? What's causing that?"

One of the ship's engineers took a guess. "We're more conductive, more easily polarized than the gasses in the atmosphere."

"Would be true, if not for the shield. What else?"

A bridge officer opened his mouth. The Doctor cut him off.

"And we're leaving 'ghosts' off the list of possibilities."

The officer closed his mouth again.

"B-b-biomass?" suggested Lee.

"How's that?"

"N-not just more p, p, p," he struggled for a second, the skipped the word. "Also more radiation and more b-biomass. Microbes in the atmosphere. They're attracted to the shields, cluster, release more r-r-r-r-radiation, more p, p, p, p, p…"

"Plasma! Brilliant!" The Doctor pounded the table enthusiastically and beamed across it in Lee's direction. "McAvoy, top of the class!"

"But what does it matter?" interrupted the captain impatiently. "That's not going to get us off the ship!"

"Can we boost the power to the remaining lifepods in any way?" asked an officer. "Get at least some of the passengers to safety?"

The Doctor answered with a quick shake of his head. "We've utilized every possible scrap of power already, and we're just too deep. What's more, with the plasma bursts hitting us at this rate, we have ten, fifteen minutes maybe until the shield collapses. Unless I can delay the shield collapse, it's all a moot point anyway."

"So what do we do?" asked Donna. She was still reeling from Shaun's betrayal, but she wasn't going to sit this one out on account of it.

"We've got two things we're shielding against. Weeelll, I say two, more like three. Third's the radiation. But the first two are the worrisome ones."

"Get to the point!"

"We've got the steady danger of atmospheric pressure. That's just going to increase as we get deeper, and suck up more and more of our shield's energy. Then we've got the plasma bursts, and if McAvoy's right, we should be able to get them to lay off the shields a little by dispersing some of the microbes clustered around the ship. That'd buy us enough time to come up with a plan C – getting off the ship."

"I'll b-bring my collected d-d-d-data on the m-microbes," Lee stammered, running out of the hall for the rest of the materials he'd left with the probe's outer shell.

The Doctor rubbed his hands together. "Once he brings that back, I'll set to work on a sonic frequency to drive the dominant microbe species away, and we can figure out how to get everyone _off_ this death trap."

Captain Manning fingered an empty bottle of scotch. He was flushed, but his anxiety from earlier in the evening had mostly faded into a sort of resolute determination to do his duty by the passengers, and if the alcohol also left him a little pessimistic, he still considered it the better of his two possible temperaments.

"There's no way off the ship," he informed them sadly, "unless we can boost the lifepods. Maybe sacrifice four of the remaining five to give the fifth a shot at a low orbit, and put only the children inside. They have less mass, anyway. Might make it farther."

The Doctor paced, both hands running through his hair and making it stand up more wild than ever. "I'm still missing something, something obvious. If we only had our maneuvering thrusters, this whole situation would be a snap. Why the hell did they have to destroy our maneuvering thrusters? Why not just take them offline for a bit?"

"Probably just angry," said Donna dryly. "They didn't need them, so why not destroy them? I wouldn't mind destroying a few things myself right now."

"No, but that's just it! They _would _have needed them, once we approached the wreck. How else were they gonna dock—" He suddenly quit talking and stared out into space with his mouth open. "OH! Oh, I'm THICK! Thick, thick, thick!"

He spun around and faced the group. "The Draconians didn't leave themselves the ability to maneuver because they didn't plan to dock! How did they plan to get to the shipwreck?"

Donna, Captain Manning, and the bridge officers all exchanged confused glances.

"Transmat!" crowed the Doctor. "You have a transmat, don't you? You must have. A great big ship like this, she's not built to ever land on a planet. You have to have an efficient way to bring supplies onboard." He lunged for the pile of portable tech equipment the crew had accumulated on his orders and started digging through it for something in particular.

The crewmen looked at each other again and nodded, still perplexed. "Yeah, yeah we do have a transmat, but so what?"

"We have to transmat off the ship!" the Doctor cried joyously.

"Transmat?" Captain Manning laughed incredulously. "To where?"

"The only place in range that's _out _of the planet's atmosphere, is built to hold 600-odd people, and has its own shield generator!"

"There _is _no such place in range!"

"Oh, yes there is!" The Doctor grinned, wild-eyed. With a dramatic flourish, he pulled a small device out of the pile and pointed out the window at the planet's rings. "The Royal Draconian Envoy!"

The rest of the group stared out the window at the shining speck in the distance that marked the Draconian shipwreck.

"You must be mad," said a crewman. "There's no radiation shielding there. No chance the hull's been left unbreached. It'd be like transmatting to open space. And not just any open space, neither – open space right smack in the radiation belt of K'ribb-dees!"

"We'll use a suit."

"We haven't got suits for that many people!"

"Only the first few need suits. This is the _Hindenburg! _You're famous for your redundant safety systems. You've got plenty of spare parts. Send over a spare shield modulator and emergency forcefield generator, and plug them into the Draconian ship's computers. Use their shipwide energy conveyance system like an emulator to run your own subroutines."

He held up the small device he'd pulled from the pile, and made a few adjustments to it with the sonic, a couple of loose springs, and a piece of chewing gum. He grinned at the crew.

"I just modified this personal shield to temporarily block the radiation around the first transmatee. Should last them at least until they get the shield modulator hooked up and producing a shipwide radiation block. Then we can cannibalize one of the lifepods for a portable atmospheric regulator for the second wave, and any other life support systems we find we need."

They all stared at him. "You think that'll work?"

"It's a chance. Best one we've got, really. Someone needs to go up there first with the upgraded personal shield before we'll know more. Any takers?" He waved the device at them.

Nobody moved. The Doctor stood next to Donna and looked at the captain and crew, and they all looked back at him, supremely unenthusiastic. The first mate finally spoke up.

"Sorry, sir, but if I'm going to die, I'd rather it be from implosion than radiation poisoning. A personal shield would never cut it. There's no way I'm going up there."

A nattering among the crew indicated general agreement with this attitude.

"Oh, come on!" said the Doctor. "Have a little faith, here! This isn't the first time I've made a bit of technology do something it wasn't designed for."

"No offense, sir, you're clearly brilliant with the computers, but you're an engines specialist for a cruise line. That's a far cry from radiation shielding. And that's... that's chewing gum."

The Doctor turned and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, muttering, "Oh, right, the engine specialist thing. _That's_ what comes back to haunt me? Figures. Look," he said, addressing the crew again, "I would happily go myself, but we are down to around eight minutes to shield collapse and I've got other priorities than proving my jiggery-pokery is safe. Is there _no one_ here willing to take that chance to save 600 lives?"

There was silence from the group and a lot of averted eye contact.

Donna sighed loudly and held out her hand for the device. "Oh, give it here. I'll do it."

The Doctor's brows scrunched together and he looked at her dubiously. "Donna, no offense, but you can't change a spark plug. This is going to involve installing a 51st century piece of human equipment into a 50th century Draconian spaceship, all while wearing a bulky suit with a headlamp."

"Yeah, well _apparently _I'm the only one who trusts that you know what you're doing enough to actually go." She flipped her hair over her shoulder and looked askance at the crew. "This lot is hopeless. Come on. Hand it over. You can walk me through it."

The Doctor hesitated a second, a slow smile of pride growing over his face. He passed her the device.

"Donna Noble. Look at you. Time was, you didn't even believe you could reopen a Sontaran teleport link. You never cease to amaze me."

"Yeah, you keep grinning at me like that, I'm gonna knock it off your face. How do I work this thing?"

The Doctor taught Donna how to use the personal shield, and then Lee came back with the microbe data. Lee and the Doctor got busy working out a sonic frequency they could transmit to disperse the microbes, and Donna went with the rest of the crew to do her own preparations.

A couple of crew members measured her for her spacesuit size, and the others showed her the essential steps for installing the backup shield modulator and forcefield generator into the Draconian ship. They seemed universally certain she was never coming back alive. Donna tried to ignore their lack of confidence and concentrated on the task at hand. Meanwhile, one part of her mind couldn't help constantly going back to Shaun and how that traitorous bastard had stabbed them all in the back and left them to die.

The worst part was that she wasn't even that choked up about it. She'd cried when Lance turned on her. She'd well and truly loved him, believed he loved her, and he'd broken her heart. _Shaun's_ betrayal made her feel angry and stupid, but he'd never seemed that devoted in the first place and she couldn't manage to feel properly shocked now. And if she was really being honest with herself, _she_ hadn't loved _him_ that much either since she got her memories back. She wasn't the same person who fell for him in the first place. That was an earlier Donna, the same Donna who fell for Lance, the desperate, needy Donna staring a solitary old age in the face and just wanting someone to love. That was before she'd opened her eyes to the greater universe. That was the Donna with no memory of the person she'd already grown into.

As soon as she got her memories back, she should've taken another long look at her choices. This was just like Lance all over again, with her rushing into a relationship just to avoid the fear of facing the future alone, and then having the bloke turn out to be some arse she barely even knows. Stupid as usual, Donna.

She noticed Lee hovering around behind her, and turned in exasperation. She was halfway into her spacesuit and the damn gloves were impossible to fasten.

"What d'_you_ want?" she asked irritably.

He stepped over the pile of equipment she was taking with her and came around to her front.

"The D-Doctor's sonic frequency is working. B-b-bought us some time."

"Great. Tell 'im he can put that brain of his to work building me my _own _time machine after that, 'cos this is the last time I trust his dodgy piloting to take us anywhere nice."

Lee fidgeted a little, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

"Er, you d-don't… you don't have to go," he said.

Donna, finally fed up, chucked the glove she'd been struggling with to the floor.

"What, are you startin' in on me, too?" she said, turning to glower at him. "Don't think I can _handle _it? Can't trust _poor, stupid Donna _with anything technical, is that it, _beefcake boy_?"

She stomped toward him and jabbed him with an accusing finger. Eyes wide, he retreated under her approach, bumped into the wall behind him, and tried unsuccessfully to hide an involuntary grin. _Beefcake boy?_

"And what the HELL do you think you're smiling at, you great git!" Donna shouted at him from two feet away, chin out and head tilting sarcastically. "You think 'cos you're gorgeous, you can have a laugh at my expense? Have a look around you. D'you see a line of technical experts waitin' to take my place? D'you see a crowd of volunteers? A waiting list, maybe? You'd never have guessed. Radiation on an airless shipwreck in a quarantine zone. Everyone's just _mad _for it. Had to fight 'em off with sticks to be the first to go. Did you want to swap places?" she asked nicely, eyebrows raised. "No? Then SHUT IT." She turned to march back towards the gear on the floor, visibly seething.

The second she moved, Lee took one stride forward and pulled her back around and into his arms. Donna suddenly found herself being held desperately against his chest, his arms wrapped tightly around her waist and shoulders, pressing her against him in a way she hadn't been since they were… well, okay, _technically _since _ever_. She squawked in surprise. He bent his head down and pressed his mouth over hers in a definitely-still-committed sort of kiss.

Then all of a sudden he released her and walked away, smile on his face, leaving her standing there stunned and confused with her mouth still agape.

The captain came up to her while she was still staring after him and trying to re-gather her wits.

"Ehm, Mrs. Temple-Noble, are you ready to go?"

She tried to reply and it came out as a squeak. She cleared her throat and tried again with better success.

"Yeah, I… I just need to get these gloves on, and the helmet. Fasten this, would you?"

Mentally, she tried to shake off what had just happened and focus on the problem at hand. She had work to do. Seriously, though. That idiot! Was that supposed to be impressive?!

…

**Tooooootally publically exposing my complete ignorance of how plasma works, ha ha! If you see something embarrassingly off-base as far as scientific inaccuracy, I'm sorry. I mean I'm trying to do the hand-wavey thing instead of mentioning real terms as much as possible, which is what the show seems to do, but there are levels of bullshit even the writers of **_**Doctor Who**_** wouldn't stoop to (probably…?). I did pull up the Wikipedia article on plasma physics, but it was too boring and I couldn't get all the way through it. I have the attention span of a 5 year old.**


	11. Chapter 10

Donna transmatted over to the Draconian ship wearing a bulky orange spacesuit with a heavy helmet. She carried three large cases containing the portable shield modulator, the forcefield generator, and a power generator, all of which immediately floated up out of her suddenly too light arms and banged against the ceiling. The gravity on the ship had failed along with the rest of the life support, and she was now drifting in zero G.

It was dark, pitch black except for the areas lit up by her helmet lamp. Looking around, she found herself in what looked like it was probably once a fairly posh welcoming room. Now, however, every surface she could see – walls, floor, ceiling, computer panels, etc. – was coated in some sort of thick black grime.

She pushed gently off the floor to grab hold of the cases drifting in the middle of the room, and her movement stirred up a cloud of black dust that floated freely around the cabin in her wake.

Following the directions given to her earlier, she made her way to the ship's bridge and set the cases down, disturbing still more dust that stuck to her helmet faceplate. Arms finally free, she reach down to her waist and hit the comm. link button.

"Doctor!"

"I'm here. How is everything?"

"Dark and gritty. They could use a hoover in here. There's grime everywhere." She noticed a couple of shirt buttons floating in the grime, and then a plastic zipper wedged into a control panel. "Oh… _Ohhhhhh_…"

"Donna, what is it?"

She swallowed thickly. "I think I just realized what the grime is. There's buttons in it."

The Doctor made a sympathetic little humming noise. "It's probably all that's left of the organic remains on the ship. Clothes, food, bodies… little houseplants. Anything the radiation could break down in fifty years."

"That's disgusting," Donna grimaced. She bent down and plugged in the case with the power generator in it first, as they'd planned. Once the power was back on, she'd be able to attach the tiny slave circuit to the main bridge control panel and the crew on the _Hindenburg_ would be able to take over the Draconian ship's computers, run a systems check, and see what was working and what else needed to be replaced.

The lights came on automatically a second after the power case had been plugged in, and Donna realized it wasn't going to be quite so easy. Her visor was smeared with black grime and she could hardly see.

"Doctor! I can't see a bloody thing in this mess!"

"That's all right, just get the slave circuit on the dashboard and we'll take over, and try to get the air filtered out for you."

Ten minutes later, the Doctor was able to give her good news.

"Well, the good news is, almost everything's working but the shields! The ship must have lost them when the plasma hit, and the radiation killed everyone inside. Then the ship fell into its current place in the planet's rings, and eventually ran out of power without anyone to keep it up. About half the rooms on the top deck are open to space right now via holes in the hull from space rocks and such, but that's easy enough to cover with the forcefield."

"What about this grime?"

"I'm going to open the bay doors remotely and turn all the atmospheric regulators on at full blast, blowing everything in the main cabins and halls out into space. You'll need to find a seat to buckle into."

"Okay, done. I'm ready when you are."

After clearing out and replacing all the air in the ship, they turned on the rest of life support and got the temperature controls and humidifiers online with no problems. Donna cleaned her visor enough to see roughly what she was doing, and, following instructions as they were relayed to her over the comms by the Doctor, got the forcefield and the _Hindenburg's _advanced shield modulator hooked up and running.

"What about the radiation?" she asked. "Is it safe, now?"

"It'll have soaked into everything in the ship," he explained, "but the shield's been upgraded to neutralize it. This might be exotic to the rest of the universe, but it was old hat to the Time Lords."

"Naturally."

Once the radiation shielding in the shipwreck was set up, the crewmen on the _Hindenburg_ began evacuating passengers and injured crew via transmat in groups of ten at a time. The interior walls and surfaces of the Draconian ship were still morbidly grimy, but the air was clean and the muck was so settled, it wasn't going anywhere unless someone wiped it with a shoulder or a careless hand. The medical staff brought stack of table cloths from the dining hall to spread out over floors of the cleanest rooms so ill people could lie down. Donna, having been relieved by crewmen in the bridge, headed there as well to sit with the still unconscious Rose.

…

The Doctor came over to Lee's side from the computer terminal they'd casually dubbed the "shipwreck terminal" and checked the screens over his shoulder.

"Hullo, McAvoy! How's the shield holding up?" he asked.

Lee shook his head discouragingly. "I c-can keep the microbes off by aiming the sonic p-p-pulse wherever they get start t-to get too thick, but…"

The Doctor looked at him seriously. "What is it?"

Lee turned the screen to show him. The probe's re-modulation program designed to adapt to the ever varying plasma signatures and pressure on K'ribb-dees was struggling to keep up with the increased stresses put on it by their depth and length of time in the atmosphere.

"N-not designed to last this long," he said grimly.

"No, I can see that," the Doctor concurred. "Right. I'll get to work strengthening the program, see if I can't squeeze a little more time out of it. We've got about half the passengers evacuated already. Should be able to give them another ten or twenty minutes to get the rest off. You should get over there yourself, get off the ship as soon as you can."

"N-Nah," Lee shrugged. "I'll s-s-stay. Easier to manage shield mechanics with a s-second p-person on microbe d-d-detail."

The Doctor smiled at him.

They worked side by side in silence for a few minutes, and then Lee said, without looking up from his screen, "…S-she, uh… she called me g-gorgeous, you know."

The Doctor glanced at him out of the corner of his eye and noted the small, lopsided grin. "Oh, did she?" he responded airily, without stopping his work.

Lee didn't answer, just grinned at the viewscreen monitoring the radiation signatures around the ship and continued to recharge for the next sonic pulse.

…

On the shipwreck, Donna organized passengers and crew as they came over, directing those carrying the injured off the transmat platform and towards the improvised medical bays, and crewmen charged with the transport of prisoners to a mostly secure storage hold they'd located one deck down.

The second prisoner transport group materialized in front of her as she waited.

"Well," she said, taking a breath. "Over this way, if you please. We've rigged up a sort of holding cell in the galley."

The Draconian princess wobbled to her feet from the floor, arms bound, and was immediately restrained by the hand of the crewman sent with her.

"I don't need _you _to tell me the way around _my _ship!" she snarled at Donna, and stomped past in the direction of the galley. Donna rolled her eyes and followed.

They stopped when the princess caught sight of the black stuff over all the cooking surfaces and slowed to a halt.

"What… what is that?" she asked, voice more subdued than normal.

Donna looked sideways at her, feeling a pang of pity.

"'S nothing. Probably just old bit of food that atomized when the radiation hit. Come on."

She stepped around the lizard woman gently and led the way towards storage. The princess didn't move, and just kept staring right through her at something across the room under the grime. Donna paused.

"You coming?"

The lizard woman's mouth moved silently for a second before her voice caught up. "That was… my nana's old…" she croaked out.

Donna followed her gaze to a tarnished metal pendant glued to the floor by a particularly thick pile of black grime.

"Do you want me to get it for you?" she asked hesitantly. "I mean, and clean it up a bit first." She wasn't sure they had running water yet, but she was fairly certain she'd seen the medics carry in a big box of sanitary wipes, and one of those would probably do some good.

The princess was silent for another moment, staring hopelessly at the pile of ash that she knew to be her grandmother.

"That… would be kind of you. Thank you."

Donna nodded and the woman closed her eyes. The guard put a gentle hand on her back and they continued moving again toward the makeshift brig.

…

Lee aimed the sonic pulse at another growing cluster of biomass picked up by the ship's sensors and triggered it. The radiation on the port side of the ship dissipated a little, but not as much as before. The pressure wasn't the only thing that was denser down here. The microbial life seemed to thrive in it. They were definitely running short on time.

"How many g-groups left to transport?" he asked the Doctor, who was busy creating and implementing new subroutines into the shield matrix every couple of minutes.

"Oh, only three or four now," came the reply. "But they'd better hurry. We're rapidly nearing the distance limit for the transmat, and there's nothing I can do once we're out of range. You should really go now."

"Can't. You s-still need me."

"Lee."

Lee looked up at the change of address. The Doctor was looking back at him in earnest.

"You won't get another chance," he said worriedly in a low voice.

Lee returned his gaze for a few moments, and then gave a half-smile and shrugged. "P-p-p-probe's gone. C-can't go back to Uni empty-handed, anyway."

The Doctor looked pained, like he still wanted to argue, but Lee intercepted him.

"I think… the m-microbes are releasing radiation as a d-d-d-defense strategy," he theorized aloud as he went back to monitoring the biomass outside and triggering the sonic dispersal pulse. "What d-do you think?"

The Doctor opened his mouth, closed it, sighed, and then turned back to his computer terminal. "Oh, I dunno. Doesn't seem like any predator native to planet could've evolved in this atmosphere and still be susceptible to radiation. And what's radiation to a rock or a big hunk of metal from the sky? I think it's something else. All these different types of radiation being passed back and forth, most of them unique to this planet in this point in time… The sensors show a different signature around us than they do over by that big patch of proto-algae – why is _that, _I'd like to know."

Lee blinked. "Food source. And we're a threat. So the r-radiation is a m-m-marker."

"Looks that way."

"They're c-communicating. Like a hive."

"Different radiation signature, different message. 'S not so different from ants or termites, actually, marking their trails with chemicals. And here we come, the foreign invader, squashing their little hill. So what do they do? Warn the troops. Amass the armies. Ignite the air."

"But the p-p-plasma bursts aren't strong enough to atomize metal or rock."

"Not yet, they aren't." The Doctor looked at him and gave a bleak little smile. "So far, we've been dealing with plasma in a state of local thermodynamic equilibrium. And since it's only getting hotter out there…"

Lee stared back at him and went to check the atmospheric readings. A gas giant only grew hotter and denser the deeper you entered it, eventually becoming so dense the gas changed to a state of liquid metallic hydrogen. While checking their current depth and temperature, something else caught his attention.

"The b-b-biomass readings below in the liquid s-surrounding the c-core… they're off the charts! They must have their c-colonies down there!"

The Doctor looked grim. "I'd say the odds of us making it that far before we're completely vaporized are slim to none."

Lee nodded and watched resolutely as the numbers on the viewscreen continue to climb.

"Well, g-good thing I stuck around then," he said. "You're g-g-gonna have your h-hands full." He looked back down at the biomass mass screen and touched a button, sending out another sonic pulse. The Doctor watched him with sad, knowing eyes and then turned back to the shield modulator to quickly throw up another layer of shielding.

"H-how much time until the t-t-transmat's out of r-range?" Lee asked after a minute.

"About fifteen seconds," answered the Doctor.

"Did the last group make it out?"

"They're going now."

Both men waited anxiously in silence. Finally, the ping that indicated a message had been received sounded from the main terminal, and the Doctor pulled it up.

"Last group received. We're the only two left on the ship."

And they had no way off.

…

**I don't understand the composition of gas giants either, as I'm sure has already become abundantly, painfully apparent. Plasma, gas giants, and radiation! Actual science? Pssshhhhhhh, we need no reality here…**

**Annnnnd I just realized I forgot that they'd already be facing plasma just from their entry into the planet's atmosphere, even without the microbes, so I should probably go fix that. On the other hand, the plasma bursts from the microbes seem less impressive when they're just one type of plasma among many, so ehhhh – I'm gonna continue to conveniently "forget" that little detail for the sake of drama.**


	12. Chapter 11

Donna pushed through the crowds of evacuees to get to the transmat pad where the last group had ported in. A sinking feeling hit her in the stomach when she scanned the faces there and didn't see the two she was looking for.

"Oh, heaven help them," said a once-posh, now bedraggled old insectoid-woman who saw Donna looking and recognized her as one of the Doctor's friends. She shuffled over to the former temp and reached out to offer a consoling hug. "Those fine young men gave their lives so the rest of us would live."

Donna glared at her and pushed her outstretched arms away.

"What the hell are you talking about? They're still coming."

"They can't," said the captain, stepping out from behind the evacuees he had stayed to help. "We're out of transmat range. The last of us barely made it through."

"So? The Doctor will upgrade it or something."

The captain shook his head sadly.

"Oh, don't be stupid! Of course he will!" Donna snapped at him. She reached for the comm. link on the belt of the spacesuit she still partially wore. "Doctor! Doctor, can you hear me? Doctor, answer me!"

Only static filled the line. Captain Manning stepped over and pushed her transceiver down. "The radiation's grown too strong for the comm. link to work. You'll have to use the subspace communicator. Come on."

He led her to the bridge where the _Hindenburg _crew had mostly cleaned and rebooted all the pre-existing Draconian hardware.

"Are you still in communication with the Doctor?" Manning asked them. They nodded their affirmation. "Good. Go ahead," he said to Donna. "It's voice to text."

"Doctor?" Donna said experimentally. "It's Donna. Can you read me?"

A message appeared a second later on a dashboard viewscreen: [Hello, Donna! How's everything on the new ship?]

"Well, it ain't exactly sunshine and roses, is it? Where the hell are you?"

[Very sorry. Can't come up.]

"What d'you mean, _can't_?"

[Transmat's out of range. These things have a fixed physical limit to the distance they traverse.]

"So we'll fly closer! We've got the Draconians' engines running again. Where do you need us to pick you up?"

[You can't. I'm serious, you really, really, really can't. That ship won't survive another plasma strike.]

"Then what's the plan?"

[Sorry]

"Sorry? Is that it? Just 'sorry'?"

[Really sorry. So sorry. Didn't mean to strand you there. Time agency might be able to take you back, but I don't recommend it. Talk it out with Rose before you do anything.]

"What the hell is that supposed to mean? You're not coming back!?"

There was a long wait before the next message came, so long Donna feared for a moment that they might have already imploded down there. Then the screen finally popped up a new message.

[Tell Rose that I—]

"Oh bloody hell, I'm telling Rose all right. This is ridiculous. We'll just see what she has to say about it."

Donna turned and shoved two crewmen out of her way who were behind her by the bridge door, and stormed up the ship to the makeshift infirmary where she'd left Rose sleeping earlier.

"Rose!"

At the shrill, ear-piercing sound of her name, Rose mmph'd and rolled to smoosh her face further into the wadded up jacket she was using as a pillow.

"ROSE! Get up! That sorry excuse for an alien boyfriend you have is trying to get himself killed again!"

Rose lifted her head, now mostly awake. "Wha'?" She winced, the headache from earlier now fully established and pounding away. "Where's the Doctor? What's he done now?"

Donna set her hands on her hips, still fuming. "He's stranded himself on some great flippin' cruise liner in the middle of crashin' into a planet, that's what!"

Rose squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, trying to clear it. What? How'd she get here? That didn't sound familiar. Well, okay, the Doctor doing something reckless and about to get himself killed sounded _very _familiar, but the cruise liner part was just… _Ahhh, _now it was coming back to her. The _Hindenburg._ Safest ship in the universe, her foot. That idiot.

"Where are we?" she breathed, staggering to her feet and shielding the light from her still-sensitive eyes with one hand. "This isn't the TARDIS."

"The TARDIS is out there floating around in space," Donna said with disgust. "If we get to it, can you fly it?"

"Errrrrrr," Rose hedged. "Sort of? Maybe? I learned how to put her into the vortex, but I haven't quite got the hang of materializing yet."

"Works for me. Come on!"

…

After a lot of bullying and basically commandeering the ship, they were able to get the crew to fly the Draconian royal cruiser as close as possible to where the TARDIS was drifting with the other debris in the planet's rings.

They couldn't exactly dock with it, since the TARDIS didn't have a standard docking port – didn't need one, usually – so Rose and Donna were at a loss until Rose realized Donna was still wearing most of her suit.

"That's it!" Rose shouted gleefully.

"What?"

"You do a spacewalk!"

"Oh," Donna said with an appalling lack of enthusiasm. "No. No. Just no. You can do the spacewalk. Here. I'm getting out of this." She bent and tried to find some way to unbuckle the waist, even though an earlier failed attempt to figure that out was the reason she was still in the damn thing at this point anyway.

Rose grabbed her hands to stop her. "No, we haven't got the time! Donna, you can _do _this! It's gonna feel amazing, yeah? Flying through space?" She grinned and nodded encouragingly.

Donna shook her head in horror. "I'll 'ave a heart attack first! Teleportin' over to a dead ship's one thing, you're all… _enclosed_ in something! I'm not walkin' out there with nothin' to hold onto!"

"It'll be fine! We'll get you a cable or something. Captain! Captain Manning!" Rose called out and ran down the corridor for help.

Finally, they got Donna fully re-suited again and triple-tied somewhat over-cautiously to the interior of the Draconian ship's airlock. Trembling more than a little, Donna waited out the decompression and the opening of the airlock's outer doors.

Suddenly, she could see space with nothing between her and the cosmos. Just stars and planets and great big ring rocks and rivulets of dust all floating everywhere in harmony with each other, and it reminded her of the first time she had seen it like this – not even a helmet that time, just a wedding veil, a dress, and an open wooden door. It put the universe in perspective.

Breathing steadily, she placed one foot in front of the other and pushed off.

The TARDIS was there, centered conveniently in front of the airlock, only twenty feet or so away. She flew slowly, propelled by her own initial momentum, and held her hands out to grab onto it as she passed. She ended up missing the door by a bit and crashing into the light that sat on the roof.

"Oh dear god! Oh god, oh god, oh god," she babbled loudly into the suit's in-helmet comm.

"You're doing fine, Donna," came Rose's voice over the speaker. "Just work your way down to the door. One hand at a time, that's it!"

Donna clung to the sides with both arms out like she was hugging the damn thing, and inched her way down with her fingers. It took a painfully long time, and she ended up upside down in front of the door.

"Now what?" she cried. "I can't let go to get into my pocket!"

"Yes, you can." That was Captain Manning's voice taking over. "Just be careful not to push away from it. As long as you don't knock into the… the thing," (he still wasn't completely convinced it was a ship, but it had been a hell of a day) "there's no reason you should drift away. Just let go with both your hands at the same time, and be careful not to move around too much and kick into it."

"That's easy for you to say!"

"There's a handle, Donna," piped Rose. "Just hook onto that with your cable or something."

Donna closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. Then she opened them, carefully let go of both sides of the TARDIS, and reached into the little zip pocket on the side of her suit to remove the key. Shaking, she inserted it into the lock and the door fell open inwardly.

Still upside down in relation to the TARDIS, Donna reached inside and pulled herself in by bracing against the door frame, and then was abruptly affected by the artificial gravity inside. She ended up falling headfirst into a tangle of spacesuit and cable on the grating ramp that led up from the door to the center console. She groaned.

"Donna! Is everything okay?"

"I'm fine. Dunno about the suit. Good thing it doesn't matter if it's airtight in here. I'm in the TARDIS. I'm gonna start reeling us in."

She got up and dragged the cable around the center console a few times for security, and then went back to the door, braced herself, and started pulling. The TARDIS and the open airlock slowly drifted closer together, until finally one was inside the other and the airlock bay doors closed.

Rose barely held it together waiting for the airlock to re-pressurize, and then threw open the door and rushed inside.

Donna stood inside the open door of the TARDIS in her suit with her helmet already off, grinning.

"Let's go get our Time Lord back!"


	13. Chapter 12

The Doctor and Lee worked frantically to keep the shields up, but layer after layer of the Doctor's makeshift defenses buckled under the pressure and fell under the onslaught of the increasingly powerful plasma waves.

They knew there was no point in prolonging the inevitable, but some stray speck of irrepressible hope kept the Doctor from just sitting back and letting it happen. Oh, he was certain he was about to die, and regeneration at this temperature under 27 quadrillion psi wasn't going to do him any good, but he was going to go down fighting. It was the principle of the thing.

"I t-think that's the end of the d-dispersal pulse generator." Lee dropped the now useless touchscreen and stepped away from his post.

"Well, it was a job well done," said the Doctor, re-modulating the shields against yet another new plasma signature and throwing up an extra layer for the pressure shield beyond that. "What got it in the end? Pressure or plasma?"

"Pressure."

Lee walked over to the starboard windows and gazed out at the rainbow of colors fracturing through the shields with every plasma wave.

The Doctor's eyes followed him and then moved up to the dirty orange light that flickered back into place between bursts. He tapped the screen and submitted another shield strengthening subroutine without looking. That was his last trick, too.

"I just wanted to say… Ship wouldn't have held together this long without your help. That last transmat team owes their lives to you."

Lee half-turned and smiled in amusement. "L-liar. But b-better to have c-company at the end, either way."

The Doctor eyed him softly, appraisingly. "I didn't ask. Was anyone with you at the library? Anyone you knew from before?"

"Nah." Lee looked back out the window again. "All dead and gone. My f-family. Friends. There was a n-n-niece… baby when I left. Old woman now. S-saw her in a rest home. D-d-didn't know me."

"I'm sorry."

"Not your f-fault."

The Doctor looked at him with sadness in his eyes.

"'S pretty," Lee said after a pause. The Doctor drew in a sharp breath and turned to look out the window as well.

"Yeah."

They stood gazing out the window together for a few more minutes, waiting for the end, and then the Doctor squinted into the flashing plasma and mist.

"Wait a minute, what's—"

A dark rectangular shape appeared momentarily in the mist and then faded away again. The Doctor, eyes growing wide as saucers, suddenly broke into a wild laugh, holding his sides with one arm and supporting himself with the other hand against the windowpane.

"Oh, I don't believe it!" he whooped.

Lee blinked in confusion. "What is it?"

The rectangle came back into view and solidified into what was clearly, but impossibly, a big blue box. A big blue box that was wobbling a lot and rapidly getting closer. A big blue box that said "police box" at the top, and had a very impossible Donna Noble hanging out the open door in half a spacesuit, hair flying in the wind, shouting as usual.

Lee turned to the Doctor as much as he could without tearing his eyes away from the magical dream box floating outside and asked, "What's she saying?"

"She's saying," said the Doctor, "'a little to the left!'"

…

Donna leaned back inside the TARDIS and shouted at Rose. "We can't go any farther! We've reached it!"

Flustered and scrambling all around the console, Rose called back, "Great! Now what?!"

"It's about four meters that way! We'll have to do one of those jumps! Rematerialize inside!"

"I can't rematerialize!" Rose shouted at Donna like she'd just suggested they jump off a building and fly. "I don't know what the hell I'm doing! I don't know what to enter! We could end up hundreds of years in the future, or on the other side of the galaxy!"

"We're just gonna have to risk it!"

"I don't know how!"

Donna turned back outside to see the Doctor banging on the glass and moving his mouth like he was shouting. Once he saw he had her attention, he opened his jacket and pretended to reach inside and pull something out. Donna frowned at him.

"You got an itch? What?"

He mouthed something exaggeratedly and made a small, wallet-sized square with his hands.

"It's a square. How many words?"

He flapped his hands open and shut like he was reading a book and showing it to people.

"_I can't understand you, you big dumbo!_ _Get a bloody sheet of paper to write on!" _Donna yelled back, mimicking his over-enunciation.

"Paper!" shouted Rose. "He's saying psychic paper! Gimme his coat, quick!"

They fumbled through the pockets of the trench coat he'd left draped over its usual railing inside and found the psychic paper. On it were coordinates that fit the TARDIS' materialization input field. Rose punched them in and hauled back on a large red lever with all her weight.

The TARDIS lurched and the time rotor began its usual screeching, malfunctioning robot-whale sound that indicated they were moving someplace. Then a massive jolt threw them both to the ground and before they could even get back to their feet, the door slammed open to admit a very happy, smiling Time Lord pushing a confusedly happy, otherwise awestruck human.

"Thanks for the lift, you two. Cutting it a bit close, weren't we?"


	14. Chapter 13

The Doctor, Rose, Donna, and Lee had saved the day. They watched from orbit as the _Hindenburg _imploded somewhere in the mists below, allowing the flashing plasma storms to run their course and peter out. Towing the wrecked Draconian ship out of the quarantine zone and alerting the authorities to its location had taken only a few minutes, and now the three veteran time travelers stood in the open door of the TARDIS looking out over the planet's rings while Lee McAvoy knocked around exploring somewhere deeper within.

Rose bumped the Doctor with her shoulder. "I thought you said the second Hindenburg had a long and successful run and retired to the interstellar shipyard museum with honors after hundreds of years," she remarked dryly.

"Er…" The Doctor tugged his ear uncomfortably. "That _may _have been the third Hindenburg…"

"Right. 'Course." Rose nodded, smiling. "What was I thinkin'? 'Course they made a third one."

She gave him a pinch and then headed into the ship to go slip her shoes off and change. Donna and the Doctor stayed behind to watch the dust a while longer.

Somewhere out in the rings was a shiny, state of the art luxury lifepod with only two people in it, waiting for rescuers to come pick them up. Probably sitting pathetically on opposite sides of the room, trying not to catch each other's alien cooties. Donna reflected quietly on another ill-fated marriage and tried not to look for it.

"You okay?" the Doctor asked quietly after a couple of minutes, still looking over the rings himself.

"Yeahhh." She shrugged his question off. She stayed silent a few minutes, and then added as a joke, "Too bad you don't have a time machine. You could take me back in time to undo a big mistake."

The Doctor looked at her with understanding in his eyes, and she felt her mocking smile fade.

"Yeah, I… didn't think so. No going back on your own personal timeline, or whatever." She shivered despite the regular room temperature and rubbed her arms.

The Doctor turned to look back out the door again before saying lightly, "Well, you know… If that whole parallel world debacle reminded me of one thing, it's that even though you can't undo what you've already done, that doesn't necessarily mean things have to end the way they are. You can always change the future. Well, I say _always. _More like _sometimes, _fixed points and all that… Weeelll, and then sometimes you change something and time just sort of flows around it and things end up the same anyway… And sometimes you think you're _not _changing anything and then you end up reversing an entire causal nexus, creating a temporal prism of parallel universes and self-contained pocket dimensions – you get the idea."

"How could I do that?" Donna asked seriously, ignoring the temporal physics tangent. "How could I face my friends and family again, after all that?"

"Easy. Don't." He shrugged. "No need to go back. You can stay on the TARDIS the rest of your life, I said so."

"But what would that say about me, though? To just get married and then blow it off? Throw him over 'cos I changed my mind?"

"Everything. And I meant everything, this time." He turned to look at her earnestly, and she looked back with glittering, vulnerable eyes. "That's _growth_, Donna. You aren't the same person you were three years ago. You're brilliant. I mean, you've always been brilliant, had that _capacity _for brilliance, and now you know it. You've got a heart that's open and full of mercy, courage, and compassion. You didn't see it back then, and you didn't miss what you'd never had, but now you've been out there, you've seen things, saved the Ood, watched the fall of Pompeii, saved the universe – _universes_, actually – and that person inside you, all that potential, has come to life and you can't put it back. Would you want to?"

Donna looked at him, sad and lost. The Doctor shifted to look out the door again, adding in a soft voice, "It's one thing to bring him with you, Donna, if he'll come. But if he can't, don't give up who you are for him. No one should ever make you give that up." A flicker of remorse flitted across his face, a reminder of the last time he'd stood this close to her in the console room and had a one-on-one conversation. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the doorframe again.

"Don't let anyone take away who you are. Not even me."

Donna saw the guilt wash over him plain as day and gave him a lopsided smile. "No fear there, spaceman. I see you coming at me with your great flippin' telepath hands up by the sides of my head again, you can bet I'll chop 'em both off, _and _make sure they don't grow back this time!"

She whacked him on the shoulder and turned back in towards the center of the room, finished brooding out the open door. The Doctor smiled slightly and closed it, walking up the ramp after her.

"Anyway!" she said lightly, forcing a little bounce into her step. "Maybe I'm better off single! I can see the universe. Come into myself a bit more. Have a good flirt now and then."

"I was… thinking of inviting Lee along," the Doctor said carefully. "That all right?"

"Yeah," Donna scoffed at him like he was ridiculous. "Course! Why wouldn't it be? More the merrier. Besides, anything to keep from being stuck by myself watching you and Rose suck face all day. You two are like rabbits! It's disgusting, is what it is!"

She turned with a sassy flip of her hair and trounced away to find her old bedroom.

…

The front lawn of the millionaire Temple-Noble estate was impeccably landscaped. The property had been purchased so very recently, and of course gardening styles varied so much from owner to owner, that the neighbors (had there been any living close enough to actually see over the surrounding hedge to the house itself) would not have been surprised to see what looked like a large, blue modern art piece sitting there on the grass that day.

If they had seen the doors open up and release two squabbling people with their arms full of luggage, they probably would have revised their impressions from 'art piece' to 'rather odd garden shed.' Fortunately, it didn't come up.

Shaun was still ranting, something he'd been doing ever since the TARDIS had unexpectedly appeared inside the mostly empty lifepod to pick him up.

"…'cos he's crazy! You had no way of knowing we'd come out of that alive! And I said that! I said it then, and I said it back in, in Venice! You'd have to be MAD to go back into that thing after all that!" He set his suitcase on the grass and turned back to Donna, who was behind him with their other two bags. "You can tell 'im, Donna, you can just tell 'im that's it. We're done. You tell 'im he's a menace, and we're 'aving nothing to do with him after this, and next time he wants to save the world or whatever, he can leave us bloody well out of it!"

Donna chucked the heavier of the two bags on the ground, and then hoisted the other up and threw it at him. He blocked his face against it and stumbled back, surprised.

"Oi! What was that for?"

"You can bugger off," Donna hissed at him, fed up and done.

"What?"

"I'm having the marriage annulled!" she shouted.

"What? You can't have it annulled!"

"A divorce, then. Whatever. I don't care." She turned to head back into the TARDIS.

Shaun shook his head and laughed, unable to take her seriously. "Donna, it's been two weeks! What would the neighbors say?"

"You can tell 'em I've gone mad."

"Donna!"

She turned back around to face him. "All right, look. You were right. The me you saw out there isn't the one you got engaged to. I'm not the same as the person you met. But this is who I am, really. And that's who I'm stayin'. And you don't get that. This isn't goin' t'work."

He fish-mouthed for a few seconds unhappily, but didn't really look distraught.

"But… but what about the house, the cars, the dog… the… bank account? You can't just pack up and leave…?"

"You keep it. I don't need it anyway." She turned around and strode back into the TARDIS without looking back.

As soon as she entered, the doors slammed firmly behind her and the time rotor began its usual up and down slide. Donna stumped up the ramp and took hold of the railing at the end.

"Let's get out of this place," she said, feeling tired behind all measure. "Find me a swamp planet or something, anything other than here."

The Doctor and Rose exchanged a look, and Rose licked her lips contemplatively.

"Dagobah it is, then, yeah?" She joked. She watched with concern as Donna climbed the rest of the ramp, shuffled over to the jump seat, and plopped down into it without answering. "You all right?" she added.

"Yeah. Fine." Donna looked gloomily off to her right somewhere like she expected a drink to pop up into her hand, which, considering this was the TARDIS, wasn't totally out of the realm of possibility. "It's only another marriage attempt turned rubbish in less time than it takes to send out thank you cards. Third time in a row. What is it with me and fiancés? Least I made it down the aisle, this time."

Rose leaned on the console and studied her friend. "So you're leavin' him?"

Donna scoffed and smiled, leaning back into the seat with her eyes closed. "Pssh, yeah. Can't feel too bad about it, leaving 'im with millions and millions of lotto winnings. Anyway, don't need it where I'm going, do I?"

"And where's that?"

"Dagobah!"


	15. Epilogue

A couple of months later…

The midday sun was up and shining, creating a nice contrast between the blue sky and the reddish, iron-rich soil of the marketplace on Androzani Major. Bolts of orange fabric hung above the street between the aging white buildings to provide shade for the shoppers milling lazily below.

Donna and Lee walked slowly, Lee mostly gazing up to admire the planet's three red moons, and Donna searching the stands for a particular fabric she'd been looking for that was supposed to be impossible to get muddy.

"I don't need you, you know," she informed him after a few minutes of comfortable silence, apropos of nothing. They'd been stopped for a little while so she could take a closer look at some interesting beads, but now they were moving down the promenade again. She adjusted her shirt collar a little to hide the dark red hickey where her shoulder met her neck, but didn't quite manage to cover it.

Lee nodded happily, still taking in the view of the hills against the moons. "Course you don't," he agreed without looking.

"Just 'cos you're bloody gorgeous, doesn't mean I'd be a clingy mess without you," she continued. "I'd be fine. I'm not growing old alone, or nuthin'. I've got friends, I've got a purpose. I'm _going_ places." His clothes were still strewn all over her bedroom from that morning, and she had sort of thrown herself at him and snogged his brains out the night before when he cooked pasta pomodori for her in the TARDIS kitchen, but it was time to re-establish some boundaries.

"Naturally," he said, perfectly at peace with the universe.

"I saved the universes, once. Not universe, _universes._ I'm good on my own."

"I know."

"It's you and your bloody 51st century pheromones, is what it is!"

He pulled her over by the hand he'd been holding their entire walk and stemmed the stream of assertions with a deep kiss. She made an affronted little noise, but then melted into it. _This _one could work. _This _one was gonna be perfect.

"When are we going to have the wedding?" he asked, breaking away so they could walk again.

"Oh, I thought July."

**The End.**

_**I'm sorry, Shaun. You seemed like a nice guy in the show. Best of luck with your millions of lottery pounds.**_

_**-Verity**_


End file.
